


Queen of the Open Road

by LadyLackless



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: (which is all toast's fault), Complete, F/M, Gen, Slow Burn, cursing/foul language, driving and wind and angsty stargazing, i hope you enjoy the ride, rape mention (canon typical), rating will develop as we go along, surgery mention (canon typical), updates biweekly, violence (canon typical), with some action-adventure in the mix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 07:34:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 34,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5039533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLackless/pseuds/LadyLackless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Citadel is almost rebuilt when a low-slung black car appears on the horizon with Max, bloody and broken, behind the wheel. Another worry to add to Furiosa’s list. As Max lies unconscious, Furiosa wonders whether their rapidly dwindling food supply will force her out onto the Fury Road again, a thought that fills her with fear—and hope.<br/>Featuring Toast as chief gunwoman, Cheedo as chief muralist/worrier, the Dag as the first Greenthumb, and Capable as hell on wheels. Complete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. arrival

Why do they turn to her for guidance? She is a driver, that is all; queen only of the combustion engine and the open road. Forget them and their questions, their incessant needs, the endless parade of empty bellies. Who is she to lead them?

She pulls the scarf over her nose and mouth and settles her goggles on her forehead. The bike is semi-new, cobbled together out of this and that—the only kind of “living again” she believes in. This will be the first ride. “Witness me,” she mutters to herself, slinging a leg over the bike.

It leaps forward when she kicks the throttle, the engine raising a gentle grumble. Satisfied, she accelerates down the road, then turns sharply, splashing up an arc of sand behind her.

“Playing like a puppy, are we?” Grinning, Tera the Vuvalini roars up alongside. Furiosa’s face is muffled by goggles and Toast’s scarf so she can only manage a nod in reply, but Tera catches her mood and whoops, sending her bike shooting forward on the Fury Road. Together, they whip past the Citadel’s border.

But this isn’t a pleasure ride, Furiosa reminds herself, even as the wind rushes over her skin and tugs at her scarf and lightens her heart. This isn’t a pleasure ride. This is a mission.

She peers at the horizon. There—a smudge of dust against the hyper-blue sky. Her heart pummels in her still-fragile chest. The car approaching is distant but familiar, and she finds herself wondering, as she did when Toast first called to her from the lookout, if some War Boy has survived. It has been five months; nothing has been heard from the Rock Riders or the small army that was immolated there; and yet here is a single car, black and bedraggled. She hates this—the necessity of approach, of shouting questions above the wind. The necessity of a decision: trust or kill? She remembers ramming the shotgun against Max’s head and firing; the anxiety that stabbed her when the chamber clicked, empty; her later gnawing fear: what if the gun had gone off, what if she had killed him before their eyes ever met?

The car bumps over the dunes toward them, engine wheezing. It is oddly familiar. This is a War Boy’s car.

“Halt!” Tera yells, and the figure behind the dusty windshield brakes obediently. Tera skids to a stop by the driver’s side, gun ready. “Put your hands out the window and state your business.”

The window judders, then rolls down just enough for a single hand—brown with grease and crusted blood—to emerge.

“Um,” wheezes a voice from within the car, and Furiosa abruptly remembers where she saw the car before.

She hurls herself off the bike. “Gun down! Gun down!” she yells to Tera, wrenching the door open.

Ragged bandages swath his right arm and shoulder, dirt and blood smeared across all visible skin. His breathing gutters and rasps like a mangled engine. Yet he gazes up at her, head wavering on his shoulders.

“Um,” he wheezes.

“Max.”

Sickened, she strides to the passenger door. “We need to get him home.” She rattles the door handle but a collision has collapsed the side of the car, rendering it entirely concave, and so she smashes her metal fist through the window and tears the door open from the inside. 

“C’mon, Max.” Hand trembling, she unwinds the scarf and lays it across the glass on the seat. “C’mon.” She leans into the car, sliding her right arm beneath his knees. He winces as her metal arm jams behind his shoulders but she is shaking too hard to be gentle. Breathing heavily, she lifts his limp body over the gearshift and into the passenger seat. He seems to weigh nothing and she notes the emaciation of his face, the way his cheekbones jut out from beneath a network of cuts and bruises. She slams the broken door and runs to the driver’s side, nearly skidding out in the sand.

“Ride ahead,” she shouts to a startled Tera. “Tell Cheedo.”

Max’s little car revs with a death-rattle sound. Automatically, she notes the engine’s grating, glances at the guzz gauge: below empty. She takes off, leaving her bike lying in the sand. At her side, Max sags toward unconsciousness. She lowers her foot on the pedal, wincing at every jounce of the suspension.

They draw near the Citadel. She hears a shot and feels her stomach twist as a hole opens in the windshield to her left. How it must appear to the lookout—her bike on its side in the sand, the strange car seeming to pursue Tera. Max slumps in his seat. Ahead, Tera waves an arm, to no avail. Another shot. She ducks.

Grunting, she struggles to maintain speed while rolling down the window. It jams and she smashes through it. The light glints off her prosthesis as she waves frantically. A moment of quiet, and she breathes in relief: how handy, to have such a recognizable left arm.

They skid into the Citadel. She hears Tera calling for Cheedo. Anxious, she presses her hand against his throat. The faint flicker of a heartbeat…

“I’m so sorry, Lady, I’m so sorry!” A former War Boy outside the window, sniper’s rifle in his shaking hand. “I’m so sorry, I just…”

“It’s fine,” she says. “Didn’t hit anything much.”

“Thank the Allmother for your poor marksmanship, Fent.” Toast, bitter and out of breath. “All right, Lady?”

She opens the door and unbends from the drivers’ seat. “It’s Max.”

A momentary brightness in Toast’s eyes, then worry. “Is he—“

“Hurt,” Furiosa said. “Where’s Cheedo?”

“She’s coming.”

“I’ll carry him,” said Fent. “I’ll help—” He drops the rifle.

“Watch the gun, boy!” Toast hisses. 

“I’m carrying him,” says Furiosa.

At the passengers’ side, she wrenches the door entirely off. Max lies sprawled on the seat. She checks again for the heartbeat in his neck before hefting him from the car.

“Max!” Cheedo, come from the Sickery. “Oh, poor poor Max! Come—“

She follows—so much following, today—as Cheedo takes off, almost at a run. Max’s head lolls against her shoulder, her prosthetic hitched awkwardly around his back, her good arm beneath the joint of his knees. He is light, too light, and yet already his weight is beginning to drag at her. But now Cheedo is holding open the Sickery door—into the dark, low room, shuffling past cots of ex-War Boys with wounds and lumps and sores—an empty bed, there. She lowers him, feeling her back strain. He looks so helpless, flopped unconscious, grubby against the relative cleanness of the cot. All around, the Boys’ whimpering; the smell of cancer and contagion; it is too dark. She has to leave. Her last sight, as she turns away, is of Cheedo, bent over the bed, easing him onto his back.

\---

Outside, heat shimmers up from sand and stone. She leans against the Sickery wall as emotion roils through her like a sandstorm. It has been five months since he stumbled up to her War Rig and brought the Green Place to the Citadel. Five months since he slipped away into the crowd with a single backward glance. She knew him for all of three days; they were a silent, straightforward team, united only by the will to survive. And yet she knows, standing there in the wavering heat, that if he dies of his injuries she will hunt those responsible and flay them.

She sighs and shifts the prosthetic. Thinks of Max’s head lolling against her shoulder and frowns. What does it signify, his arrival, bloody and battered and in need? What does it mean, that his return should precipitate such a hail of emotions within her? 

She reiterates to herself how she will find them, what she will do to them, if he dies…

\---

The greenhouse air carries the damp earth smell of growth and decay. Under Joe’s regime, the building of precious glass was filled with a rusted system of planters hoisted up on chains to take their turn in the sun, producing the dull foodstuffs that sustained the War Boys and the delicacies for Joe and his wives. But when Furiosa returned five months ago bearing Joe’s body, the Citadel went into upheaval. She lay death-still in bed those first few days, unseeing, unable to move, while outside Milking Mothers, Pups, and Wretched faced off against those ailing half-lives who rose up behind the Organic Mechanic to fight until death historic. There were some who defected; her old friend the Grease Monkey, Joe’s chief mechanic, fought in Furiosa’s name, while a handful of sick War Boys rechristened themselves Furies and helped Toast marshal the new fighters. But on the third day of battle Toast battered down the greenhouse door to find the planters overturned, the seedlings torn from the soil, and a flaming pyre whose foul smoke blackened the panes of glass. The Green Master had remained faithful to the Immortan and his final rebellion was the destruction of their knowledge and their source of food. 

Now, Dag and her team struggle to rebuild. The planters are re-hung and the windows cleaned but the knowledge is lost, nothing remaining of the Green Master or his books and ledgers save a pile of ash and bone. Still, they have the Keeper’s seeds, and some early successes. Standing inside the threshold, Furiosa inhales the peaty scent of soil and watches as Dag hisses instructions to a herd of small ex-War Pups. Of all her patchwork new queendom, this is the most satisfying: Dag’s unlikely blossoming in the last five months, the scrawny War Pups with dirt under their fingernails and slightly more flesh about their ribs, the heavy scent of earth. For a moment Furiosa shuts her eyes.

She hears the Dag approach, and feels a hand against the nape of her neck as the Dag presses her forehead to Furiosa’s. At first the Wives’ adoption of the gesture irritated her. Now, it signals to her their love and trust. She opens her eyes. “Show me.”

Dag stalks to the farthest tower of planters and unwinds the crank. Steadily, the planter nearest the glass roof rattles down to eye level. Sprouts peer up from the dark soil, plump green leaves burrowing their way to the light.

“Any idea what these ones will be?”

Dag shakes her head, a mournful no. Keeper left no labels. But the Dag has begun to write: precious pencil scratched into the front sheets of an old book, dates and notes and diagrams, marking the position of the seeds planted, their type, the dates of their watering, hours spent in the sunniest part of the greenhouse. She holds the book now, makes a note in the most miniscule of handwriting: _Thurs 19. Showed Fury._

Reading over her shoulder, Furiosa smiles. “Show me last month’s.”

Those first few days, when Furiosa was so very weak, Dag came to her in tears. She held out Keeper’s bag to Furiosa, wordless, and Furiosa, prone on her narrow cot, drew a ragged breath and reached to pull Dag into her arms. What can one say to a grief like that? She held the shaking Dag and felt sudden, vicious anger that anyone should have destroyed something so precious. But the Dag mourned fast and thoroughly, and when the battle was over she strode into the greenhouses with her back straight as iron and her white hair streaming like a war flag.

The seeds from last month’s experimental batch are now a hand span tall, most of them. But some seedlings slump, leaves yellow and withered.

Dag gnaws at her lip.

“We’ll try those ones again, in another season maybe,” Furiosa says.

“These aren’t the only ones,” says the Dag. Wordless, she winches the planter to the top, sending another one swinging down in its place. Furiosa feels the muscles in her jaw tighten. Every seedling in the planter is yellowed and limp.

“They’re kale,” Dag says. “Green Master used to grow ‘em. The Boys ate them, to prevent scurvy. But I don’t know what’s wrong.” A Pup appears at her side for a moment and, absentminded, she lays a palm on the small round head.

Furiosa sighs, looks up through the dusty glass to the relentless blue sky. “Well, we can only keep trying.” She needs to get better, better enough to survive a supply run. Better enough to bargain.

But first they need to find something to trade.

\---

Joe’s old assembly hall has become the Mess, where Wretched and Milking Mothers and Pups and all the other members of the old divisions now eat together, sharing equally from the Citadel’s scant reserves. Furiosa spoons down her bowlful of gruel absent any thought. Outside the sun is setting, and with the darkness comes the cold: desert air, barely lingering at “pleasant,” plummets to a bone-chilling temperature at night. Furiosa stares out between the rocks to the horizon. So flat, the black line of the earth against the dusky periwinkle sky; as always she feels a tug in her chest, the urge to abandon it all for the rush of cool air and the sweet sensation of speed. But there is another tug in her chest tonight. She finds herself standing at the Sickery door.

Cheedo has long since finished her shift and gone to bed, and Part, an ex-War Boy—that is, a Fury—supervises. She watches him tend a wounded Wretched, then drifts among the beds to stand over Max.

Someone has sponged clean his face and hair, and the bandages covering his entire right arm and shoulder are now clean and fresh. His left leg, too, is injured, bound and elevated on a pile of folded rags. In his sleep, he looks younger, vulnerable. His gaunt face is swollen from bruising. How long did this Fool drive, battered and bleeding, to plead help at her door? Will he speak to her, when he awakes? Or will he disappear again with a single backward glance?

The day aches at her, in the soreness at the small of her back and the swelling in her feet. The straps of her prosthesis rasp against her skin, grating on the rash brought about by heat and hard labor. She tugs at it, looking down at him, aching, wondering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends. Thanks for making it this far.
> 
> This fic is fully written & edited; it will be making the transition from my computer hard drive to this website to your eyes twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday. Stalk me at my [fic tumblr](http://www.lady-lackless.tumblr.com) for updates.
> 
> See you Thursday.


	2. test ride

_Bang. Bang. Bang._ Urgent pounding on her chamber door. Disoriented, she hurls herself upright and stumbles through the soft bloom of dawn to the door of her tiny room. Opening it, she finds Cheedo.

“It’s Max!”

Together they pelt down the stairs, Cheedo panting through tears, Furiosa gripping her side. The journey to the Sickery seems to take forever. When they burst from the stairwell into the central courtyard she can hear the echo of Max’s cries from the Sickery chamber. Inside, someone—probably Part—has lashed Max to the cot. He writhes against the restraints, eyes rolled back in his head. Part stands by the pillow, a ridiculously over-large figure hunched over the low bed, attempting to dab Max’s brow with a rag.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Part says, voice cracking. “This isn’t a normal seizure.”

Max’s eyelids flutter open, his pupils blown wide and focused straight on Furiosa. Stepping to the bed she eases her hand beneath his neck and slowly lowers her brow to his.

The eyes shut. The quaking slows. She waits to withdraw until she can hear his breathing again, ragged but steady.

“My guess,” she says, “would be a post-traumatic incident.” She looks around at the low dark room that once belonged to the Organic Mechanic and the beds full of moaning ex-War Boys; the room does contain a few possible triggers. “If it happens again, get me.”

Weaving her way back through the cots she pauses, places a hand on Cheedo’s shoulder. “And you need more rest.”

“No,” Cheedo says. “No, I—there’s so much to do—”

“Listen to me,” Furiosa says, drawing her in close. “Your health comes first. Hear me? You take care of yourself. Guard yourself if need be.”

“But—”

“If you insist on destroying yourself this way I will move you to the greenhouse.”

“Yes, Lady,” Cheedo says, blinking back tears, still breathing heavily. Furiosa sighs and brings her forehead to the girl’s.

“And send a Pup as a runner next time, okay?”

\---

She is tempted to take her bike out on the dunes, lose her anxieties in the rush and whip of wind. But Grease Monkey has warned against joyriding: guzzoline supplies are precious. Gone is Joe’s era of waste and ruin. Instead she heads to the Monkey Shop. A few hours spent elbow-deep in oil and spare parts should fortify her against the Council meeting that afternoon, the inevitable circle of hopeful faces turned toward her.

Like the Sickery, the Monkey Shop is in the same location as it was in Joe’s time: her former haunt. It’s set into the rock at ground level, a warren of caves and alcoves with wide doors to let in the bright sun. There are no surviving blackthumbs, but without a standing army to supply the Grease Monkey no longer works at a frenzied pace, whipping War Rigs and pursuit vehicles into motion. Now he has so far focused on salvaging scrap metal and training Pups in the fine art of tinkering. Even from a distance she can hear tools clanking, the thrum of a motor, the Grease Monkey’s affectionate badgering. She’s drawing near when the main cave entrance echoes with yells. Capable whips out of the doorway on a battered bike, her goggles forgotten on her forehead. The Grease Monkey strides out behind her, wiping his hands on a rag.

“Test-driving the new efficiency mods,” he says.

Capable sends the bike shooting over a dune, catching air.

“Looks like she’s driving with real efficiency,” Furiosa says drily.

“Mmph,” says the Grease Monkey. “I think we’ve really got a wrench on it with this mod. Now if you’ll just let me open up the engine of that bike of yours…”

“My ride, my mods.” She shoves him affectionately in the shoulder and he shoves back. Grease is a holdover, an old ally; the hidden cabin in the War Rig was his idea, back when Furiosa had a living cargo to smuggle and a bright dream of green. Now he and Furiosa watch as Capable brings the bike bucking to a stop in front of the Monkey Shop.

“How does she ride?” Grease says.

“Sweet and easy,” Capable says. “Except now the transmission grinds a bit when I drop her into gear.”

“Hmm,” Grease says. 

“Crack her open and I’ll take a look,” Furiosa says, wrinkling her nose at Grease. “Since I happen to be here anyway.”

\---

She arrives at the Council meeting covered in grime and sweat. Meetings are held in a cool room deep in Citadel’s stone heart, with a cup for water at every place around the table and a big pitcher in the middle. Furiosa insisted on this, for symbolism’s sake. This is the age of sharing.

Waiting for her are: Toast, from defense; Dag and Tortoise, a former Milking Mother, representing the greenhouses; Sand, once one of Joe’s breeders, now supervising the resettlement of the Wretched into the Citadel; Tarn, the Wretched who oversees the kitchen and food supply; Lydda, from sanitation; Tera and Scram, the last two Vuvalini, who lead the Furies; and Part, from the Sickery. 

“What are the issues today.” She leaves off the question mark, drops heavily into her seat.

“War Boys keep giving Wretched flak when we try to settle ‘em—” Sand says.

Part glowers. “I tell you, they’re Furies now, not War Boys—”

“Whatever, I’m sick of their dirty looks, acting like our people are spreading contagion when we’re just as clean as your lot—”

“ ‘Our’ people? You didn’t have anything to do with the Wretched after Joe snagged you at fourteen years old—”

“Enough!” Furiosa roars, slamming her prosthesis into the table. She is surprised to find herself standing. “What have I said before? These meetings—we each are under a lot of stress right now. But we can’t bring that to the Council. We just—we can’t! Or we’ll tear ourselves apart.” Her breath comes in gasps, and she feels the painful pulling sensation in her lung again, the scar tissue stretched tight and brittle. She collapses back into the chair. “Now. What do you have to say for yourselves.”

A long silence. Then Part clears his throat. “Sorry, Sand. That was… uncalled for.”

Sand sighs. “And I’m sorry for—bringing my anger. I just—” She puts her head in her hands. “I wish that after all we’ve done, all we’ve come through, there wouldn’t be this—disunity, this fracture, along the lines of Joe’s old division. Wretched versus—Furies. I wish we could heal that break.”

“And we will,” Tarn says. He’s an old man, with a dark narrow face and a ragged white beard. “Already so much has improved. When you began the common dining, Furiosa—it meant a lot for the Wretched, to see that everyone was getting the same food, to see you yourself watching over the serving just as soon as you could walk. We have equality in the stomach, now.” 

“Perhaps we could get some Furies to help Wretched find their way around inside,” Furiosa says.

Part sneers. Sand bristles. Toast rolls her eyes. “Look, we need to do something about this. I’ve been working with the half-lives on defense, and, well, Fent is plain awful—”

Part glowers. “Don’t you say that about my brother.” 

“Fine,” Toast says. “The half-lives are sick, drained, and weak. We Furies need to recruit from the Wretched, and we need everybody to get along. So why don’t we get some half-lives to show the Wretched around. Build some”—she smirks—“community spirit.”

“Yes,” Furiosa says, and Sand stops mid-complaint.

The door creaks and the Grease Monkey strolls in, late as ever. He flashes a wide, lazy grin. “What’d I miss?”

Dag glares at him.

“Let’s hear about the food supply,” Furiosa says tiredly.

“Joe’s stores are running low,” Tortoise says. “We’ve got another month, maybe.”

“A month!”

“We need to save some,” Dag says, her voice low. “For seed grain.”

“And the greenhouses?”

Dag looks down at her hands and mumbles.

“C’mon, Dag,” Furiosa says gently. 

“Output is—not good,” Dag spits. “We’ll need to rely on stores a while yet.”

“What about the rooftop plantings?” Furiosa asks.

Dag shrugs, picks at a nail.

“We’re working on plans,” Tortoise says. “It’s not clear what plant we should try, and it’s quite a risk growing so many plants at once, especially in the open. Joe’s outdoor plantings seem to have held mixed success. We’ve got a few test plants up there now—some of Keeper’s beans—”

A quiet umm of appreciation goes up from around the table. Beans would be nice.

“Well, good,” Furiosa says. Beans are a positive note to end on. “I understand things are moving slow, and it’s good you’re being conservative with seed. We’ll make a grain run to Gastown soon.”

“But… without mothers’ milk, what will we trade?”

Furiosa pings a metal finger against her water cup. “We’ll find something.”

\---

She will labor in the latrine, now that the meeting is done. Because it’s fair; because it’s right; because the exertion clears her mind and strengthens her lungs; and because they need to see her like this, the Furies and the Wretched and the Pups, sweating as they sweat, sweating as Joe never did. But before she picks up the shovel she will drop by the Sickery, just to see.

Max lies still, but his eyes twitch beneath his eyelids. Standing in the dark room, listening to the moans of the sick—what are there? Twenty bedridden here, out of a population of two hundred all together, Wretched and Joe’s old servants both? Pathetic—she wonders if maybe the Sickery shouldn’t be moved. Somewhere with windows.

Looking down at Max’s fluttering eyelids, she wonders if maybe he shouldn’t be moved.

Cheedo is on shift—hurrah, her impromptu plan will go over easier. The girl finishes laying a poultice over a Fury’s tumor before joining Furiosa at Max’s bed.

“I worry that there may be—triggers, for him here.” Furiosa gestures to the long dark hallway, the chains still hooked to the walls. “The Organic Mechanic’s old… lair.”

Cheedo nods, bends to fuss with Max’s bandage, and for a moment Furiosa wonders what it would be like, to have that ease of touch, never having to overcome an internal barrier to lay skin against skin.

“I wonder if he might be moved.”

Cheedo raises dark eyes to hers. “But where?”

“I don’t know. Away from… this?” Her gesture encompasses the Organic Mechanic’s entire complex: the sickroom, the storerooms, the office with chests of strange and brutal implements.

“But Fury,” Cheedo says. “—Lady, how would we tend to him? We need them here, all of them. There are so many, and—if I had to move room to room to treat them, and—what if something happened, and I wasn’t there—”

“Hush,” Furiosa says. “Forget it.” She closes her eyes, lays a hand on the other’s shoulder. “Never mind that, it was a silly idea.”

“His wounds,” Cheedo says, her voice small. “On his shoulder and his leg. There were—bite marks.”

“Bite marks?”

“Human bite marks.”

Furiosa feels herself go still.

“Did he ever—say? Where he was going, when he left?”

“No, Cheedo, I told you, he only looked at me.”

“Oh.” Cheedo shrinks into herself.

“Well, how lucky he is to have wound up here,” Furiosa says, trying to clear the image—of carnivory, of brutality—from her mind. “How is the Pup training going?”

“Oh,” Cheedo says, brightening. “Oh, they’re doing so well! Let me show you—”

Numb, Furiosa follows her down the hall.


	3. the barest nod

She dreams that night of finding. Dreams of standing in a dark starswept night and glowing with joy at having _found_ —person or place, she does not know. She wakes slow and lies in her cot in the bare room as the glow leaves her, as the starswept night subsides to the heat of the upper-floor chamber. At last she rises and pads to the other room, the shared room. It is empty in the cool dark but for Toast, dour as ever.

Furiosa chose her room as soon as she could walk again. She chose it for its height and its window: both to survey the sands and to stand a little distant above their chaos. Toast was the first to follow her, to choose an adjacent room, to drag a ragged couch into the antechamber. Then Capable, and finally Cheedo and Dag, creating their own Green Place three hundred feet above the ground. The former Wives have stuck with her; “Fury’s harem,” Capable laughed once, and Cheedo grinned, and Toast glared. At first, when the entire Citadel seemed to swing by a slender chain above disaster, Furiosa resented the long stair climb to the top, resented the closeness of the women, their rooms clustered about the single shared space. But the climb has strengthened her torn lung and the women have brought life into the chamber: Dag’s plants in the anteroom windowsill, Cheedo’s murals, Toast’s books and lists and plans. And now, mired in the hopeless feeling of a drained dream, Furiosa smiles to see Toast slouched on the sofa, sleepless herself. In the morning, she wakes with Toast’s head on her shoulder.

\---

Hot noontime sun. “Listen.” She puts her hand in the middle of the teen’s chest and shoves, hard. “I’m not asking you to _like_ working with him. I’m asking you to _avoid starting shovel battles in the middle of the latrine!_ ”

“That’s fine, Lady,” the boy hisses. “That’s just a fine idea. But you have no idea of what this smigging War Boy did to my mother!”

“I have no idea, huh? I have no idea?” 

“Oh,” the boy says. “ _Oh._ ”

“Look,” she says. “If he—causes trouble, tell me and I’ll shut him out to die on the Fury Road myself. But we all have adjusting to do now. And it isn’t easy. For any of us.”

“Yes, Lady.” Abashed, he bows to her, a deep bow from the waist, and his deference makes her flinch. She is not, will not be, some new Immortan.

Later, she draws Lydda aside. “See that War Boy?”

“The one who Beetle walloped with the shovel? Yeah.”

“Put him in a different crew,” Furiosa says, and brushes sand from her hands, unsettled.

\---

“Try that,” Grease says, standing and pocketing the Allan wrench. Furiosa guns the engine, wondering idly whether Joe’s guzzoline stores will really last out the month like Grease said they would. She likes Grease—even cares about him—and sometimes his casual attitude is just what she needs, but other times his nonchalance leaves her anxious and angry.

The bike stutters under her, abruptly returning her to the present. “It’s better. But will that really help with efficiency?”

“In thought, yes,” Grease says. “In practice? Lady, we haven’t been burning enough guzz to find out.”

Furiosa hears the patting sound of bare feet in the sand. Turning, she sees a Pup.

He stops, bends double, wheezes out, “Cheedo remembered—to send a Pup—this time—”

“What?” Furiosa says. Then, “Oh.”

Running, her lung burns beneath the scars and her right knee aches. She skids to a stop in front of the Sickery and ducks into the dark room.

Cheedo stands over Max’s cot, her hands on his shoulders, bearing down. Max’s eyes are closed and he’s breathing heavily.

Part comes up to Furiosa, his face ashen. “He came to, but something happened, I don’t know. Not a seizure, but—he froze up, kinda, and Cheedo thought he stopped breathing. When I came over, well—he freaked.”

Furiosa places a hand over her solar plexus, draws three steady breaths, tries to ignore the twisting sensation in the scar tissue. Forcing her feet to go slow, she passes the bed of a moaning Pup to stand over Max.

As she watches his face relaxes, his hands unclench in their restraints. Cheedo straightens and clings to Furiosa’s upper arm.

“Why is he bound?”

“We thought he might thrash, and—” Cheedo’s voice quavers, and there are tear streaks on her face. “I just—I don’t understand why he’s not getting better.”

“It’s only been two days,” Furiosa says, just as a grunt comes from the cot.

Max opens his eyes.

“Hey,” Furiosa says.

Max nods, the barest of motions, and closes his eyes.

Her first instinct is to carry him, hoist him over her shoulder in a rescue carry and climb the hundred steps herself. Instead, she puts on her Imperator scowl and gestures to Part.

“We need to get him out of here. Away from all these triggers.” Away from the Organic Mechanic’s dark room, and all the former War Boys. He might not know that they are Furies now.

“But where?”

“Outside my chamber there is a—little room.” She sees Cheedo’s eyes widen in recognition. “There’s an old sofa there. Not ideal, but”—she shrugs—“he will have care.”

“What?” Part says. “Don’t be ridiculous—”

“No,” Cheedo says. “It’s a—it’s a wonderful idea.” She turns to Furiosa. “And I just know Capable will help take care of him, and it’s such a nice big room, and we can even put a cot up there—”

“How will we get him up there?” Part says.

“If only someone would run the lift for us!” Cheedo says, with almost theatrical desperation. Furiosa frowns at her. Then the Pups begin to crowd round Max’s cot, gazing up at her with awe and at Cheedo with—love? One child’s hand raises, and then another, and soon Cheedo is beaming and ushering a crew of Pups to the disused lift wheels, and Furiosa is helping Part lift Max’s cot, and they are swaying above the blinding sand as the lift carries them unevenly higher. She stares at his bruised face, trying not to remember the last time she rode this lift. When it stops they have only a short walk to the chamber. Inside, they set Max’s cot in one corner. Furiosa straightens her back, wincing, and massages her hand with a metal thumb. Is it in her mind, or does he look more peaceful already?

“This is mad,” Part hisses, already headed for the stairs.

But that night Capable cries to see Max, and Cheedo brings up fresh bandages—“though his wounds aren’t so bad, really they’re not, we think the problem’s mainly exhaustion and malnutrition”—and when Toast comes home she grins, actually grins, to find him there. Even Dag, returning late and dirty, comes to see. The room has gone dusky-pinkish from reflected sunset and as she looks around, at the belongings of the women and her prosthesis leaned up against the wall, she thinks, _Home._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter. More adventure Thursday, I promise.


	4. a god with a gun in her hand

Early morning, and the little room near the top of the Citadel is painted rose by the rising sun. Capable hands her a cup of tea—herbs courtesy of Dag—and the steam drifts up to caress her neck and face as she stands looking out the window at the courtyard far below. Sleepy Cheedo is still curled on the sofa. In the corner Max emits what sounds like a snore.

From this height she can’t hear anything. What she witnesses, then, is nothing but the white blur of a Fury leaving the Mess at a run. After a moment Tarn limps out, a tiny figure. Then Tera, also running, shouting, waving a gun.

She slams her cup onto the windowsill and sprints to the door.

Taking the stairs two at a time, she struggles to buckle her prosthesis into place, and fuck-all, she only has one gun. It has happened, it has finally happened, one of the War Boys—one of her Furies—has gone rogue—

Outside, she is struck by a buffet of voices and wind.

“Didn’t do anything but what we were all thinking—Joe, he fed us better than this—” He is pressed against the rock wall with his hands above his head, courtesy of Tera (may she ride eternal!) and her shotgun.

“What happened,” Furiosa says.

“Took a sack of foodstuff from the storeroom,” Tarn says. “I was distracted. Haven’t bothered with real guards for months now.” He shifts, leaning heavily on his cane. “Guess we were too trusting.”

“What I want to know is why any Fury of mine would be hungry,” Tera says, prodding the boy’s back viciously with the barrel of the shotgun. (Unloaded, Furiosa sees.) “I watch over your feedin’ myself, boy. Tarn here isn’t skimpy.”

“Yeah?” the Fury says, twisting his head to glare at Tera from the corner of one eye. “Men aren’t meant to live off fuckin’ oatmeal all the time, and only two meals a day—”

Furiosa frowns at him. “You say things were better under Joe?” Of course they were, without the Wretched to support.

“Yeah,” the Fury spits. “And I wasn’t takin’ orders from crusty old bitches, either—”

Quick as thought she has him pinned against the wall, her hands around his throat, metal thumb jammed into his jugular. 

“Did it ever occur to you,” she hisses, pressing his head into the stone, “that I once considered starting over fresh? Why save the War Boys”—the metal hand clamps tighter—“who were bred in hopeless cruelty? Why let you threaten”—she shakes him—“the better world I want to create?” He is turning purple. “But I didn’t. I could have ended your fucking half-life. Instead I fed you and tasked those crusty old bitches with keeping you alive.” She drops him and he falls, spluttering, to the sand. When he looks up, she continues. “You have already been given one fresh start. This is your second. And if you ever test me again…” She places one booted foot on his outstretched hand and bears down, hard. “Now. You will obey Tarn unquestioningly in the kitchen for thirty-one days. And if so much as a single oat goes missing during that time I will drop-kick you to Valhalla myself.”

“Yes, Lady,” he blubbers, spittle foaming at the corners of his mouth, and the impact of her actions makes her sick. She turns to Tarn, murmurs, “I trust you can handle him?” The old man nods and tightens his grip on the metal walking stick. 

Tera steps to stand beside her. “That was well done, Lady.”

“Was it?” She turns and walks abruptly back into the building, Tera close behind her.

“He’ll not steal again,” Tera says. 

“Won’t he? Does it matter?” At the foot of the steps she whirls, looks Tera straight in the eye. “I feel just like _him_.”

“Like who?”

“Immortan Joe,” she hisses. The cult leader, sprawling atop a throne of violence and intimidation.

“But—”

“You didn’t know him so don’t you try to soothe me.” She turns to climb the stairs.

“Lady—Where are you going?”

“To find Toast.”

\---

When they finish, it is very simple—the barest sketch of crimes and punishments, outlined in watery ink on the flyleaf of Toast’s book of military history. Furiosa, fighting nausea, sits in the center of the sofa, working to balance Toast’s harshness against Capable’s excessive romanticism, to prevent the morning’s work from ending in blows. This time, at least. In future, judgments will come before the Council, and their new code itself will be Council-amended and voted upon by everyone, Furies and Wretched both.

“The Cut,” says Capable, who is doing the writing. She dots the i’s in the final line of neat cursive and blows across the ink. 

“The what?” Toast says.

“The Cut. That’s what we should call us. All of us.”

“Why in Valhalla’s name—”

“Well, the Boltcutters are our symbol now. Everyone more or less agrees on that,” Capable says. “So what do boltcutters do? They cut. As in, we’ve been cut. Cut free.”

Toast grimaces. “That’s the stupidest thing—”

“I think it would bring a sense of unity, having a name that includes Wretched and Furies and Milking Mothers and everyone else,” Capable says. “And I don’t know why not the Cut.”

“I like it,” Furiosa says.

Capable scribbles another line at the bottom of the referendum. “There.” Furiosa watches with relief as Capable tears the page out, hands it over. Things are different. _She_ is different. _She_ is fair…

\---

She longs to return to the Monkey Shop. Instead she swelters in the greenhouse, trying to resurrect the mechanism that sends the rattling planters rotating from the floor to the sun-drenched top upper level. It’s tough, stressful work, but satisfying, and ultimately the links are repaired and the crank assembly more or less patched together. Returning with Dag after dusk, she inhales her bowl of gruel and trudges up the hundred stairs. At the top she leans against the door frame, catching her breath.

A cough from the cot in the corner. “Hey,” Max says, and coughs again.

“Hey,” she says. A day in the upper room has lessened his sickly pallor, and his eyes are clear. Unsteadily, she lowers herself to sit on the cot beside him. Crosses her ankles, then recrosses them. Runs a finger beneath the shoulder strap of her prosthesis. On the other side of the large room, Toast lies on the sofa and pages through a book, while Dag bends to kiss Cheedo. Capable, sewing, giggles at them. 

“It’s funny—” she says, just as Max says, “Um.”

“Go ahead,” she says, but he shakes his head and closes his eyes.

“It’s funny, seeing them like this,” she murmurs.

He clears his throat. “Free.”

“Yes,” she says. “But more harried, too.”

He looks at her.

“I nag them,” she says, unsure why she is nattering on this way, “to work less, to rest more.”

“Mm.”

The pause stretches. After a time, Furiosa relaxes into it. He brings a hand to his mouth, coughs slightly. Hums. Another pause, long and comfortable. When she looks over he has fallen asleep.

Cheedo appears by her side. “He’s out?”

“Um…”

“Good.” Kneeling by the cot, Cheedo reaches to lift his eyelids. His eyes have rolled back in his head and only the whites are visible.

“Cheedo—did you drug him?”

“Yes but he agreed to it.”

“Cheedo—”

“Part’s here!” As if on cue the door creaks open and Part enters, tatters of bandage gripped in one hand and Tera’s teakettle in the other.

Toast lays her book aside and slips out the door. Glaring balefully, the Dag follows. Furiosa watches, bewildered, as Part sets out the precious portable burner and places the kettle on it. Cheedo tosses back Max’s blanket and carefully lifts the bandaged knee. She must just be changing the bandages. Furiosa forces her breathing to steady. 

Then Part brings out a small metal case. She stares at it. Why does it seem so familiar? Part shifts it and she hears it rattle. Ah yes, the battered box that belonged to the Organic Mechanic.

“Cheedo, what are you doing.”

“You know what the sweet half-lives call me?” Cheedo says brightly. “Lady Lancer! Isn’t that funny?” The implements in the case clank as she sorts through them, pulling out scissors, a scalpel, the slender metal spine known as a lance. She drops them in the boiling water. Max’s bare knee oozes slightly and for the first time Furiosa notices the boils, a row of infected bulges just below his kneecap.

“The lance, please, Part.”

Capable—seated on the cot with Max’s head cradled in her lap—says, “Fury, you don’t have to look.” But she watches as Part fishes for the lance using a pair of tongs. It’s only when he raises them from the water that she sees—he doesn’t hold tongs but surgical clamps, the scissorlike implements that grip flesh and hold it for the knife. Her stomach turns and she runs to the hall, shuddering, suddenly weak. She collapses to her knees. All the deaths she has presided over like a god with a gun in her hand, and yet she cannot watch this—cannot stomach this repair, an undoing of the kind of damage she has so often inflicted. She heaves.

When she comes to she is curled on the stone, her hand pushed against her stomach, pressed into the soft place beneath her belly button where the two parallel scars lie gnarled and numb beneath her fingertips.


	5. threat of restraint

The days pass. She works in the latrine trench; in the greenhouse. Max sleeps. He seems to sleep all the time, or else to lie on the cot with his eyes shut, mouth grim, eyes twitching beneath their lids, and she wonders what he feels, what past traumas spin in his mind. Herself, she lets her days tick by in toil and sweat, and occasional, indulgent visits to the Monkey Shop. She should be swinging a pick down in the latrine trench, or mending the greenhouse’s irrigation system. Instead she’s listening to Grease direct a crew of Pups with mock irritation while she teaches Capable to mend a tire.

“Put it by your cheek,” she says, lifting the inflated tire. “Feel for a puff of air to find the puncture.”

“I wonder,” Capable says, looking at the Pups and ignoring the tire. “I wonder if we shouldn’t try to teach them.”

“The breeders took them in,” Furiosa says. “First thing that happened once the fighting stopped.”

“Yeah, but the breeders can’t read, and most of them don’t remember much from before.”

Furiosa straightens her back, rolls her shoulders.

“We should teach them,” Capable says. “I’ll teach them. They’re our chance to break the cycle.”

“They’ll still have to work.”

“Oh yes,” Capable says. “But—can’t that be a part of it?”

And so Furiosa shows Capable—and an entire crew of Pups—how to mend a tire.

\---

That evening, Tera ambushes her on the stairs.

“Girlie,” Tera says.

“Mm,” says Furiosa. ‘Fury’ may be a silly nickname but she’ll accept it from Cheedo and the rest. ‘Girlie’ is too much to take.

“I thought you were gonna announce the search. To find something to trade, since the greenhouse isn’t goin’ anywhere.” Tera regards her with clever eyes set deep in a lattice of wrinkles.

“Yes. We might succeed if everyone is involved.”

“Then you better let ‘em know, girlie.”

She bristles. “And what do you suggest? I stand in Joe’s balcony and shout?”

“You’re the leader,” Tera says, and shrugs. “You gotta lead, honey.”

Sighing, Furiosa climbs the last stairs alone. She pauses in the doorway to watch Cheedo layer grey paint along the back wall. Lulled by the repetitive strokes of Cheedo’s brush, she lets her gaze drift over the high-ceilinged room, past the ragged couch, to the little cot. 

If her eyes hadn’t been on him she wouldn’t have heard him speak. 

“What?”

He coughs, forces his gravelly voice louder. “Do you, ah, ever… sit?”

“Not much, no.” Chuckling, she walks over and awkwardly eases herself to the floor. The days that whip by her—how they must stretch out long for him, alone in the quiet room at the top of the stairs. 

He clears his throat. “Wanted to sit up but, ah…”

“Cheedo wouldn’t let you?”

He hums in agreement. “Threatened to, ah, restrain me.”

“Hm.” Furiosa hides a smile. Tiny Cheedo, making her proud. “I’m sure she’ll let you up when the time is right.”

He makes an expression, a quirk of the mouth softened by the warm brown eyes, which implies gentle resignation. 

They share a silence for a time. Furiosa sighs and unbuckles the prosthetic, shifts where she’s leaning against the cot. When he speaks, voice low and gravelly, it startles her.

“You, ah…”

She turns.

“Um, you look…” His eyes flick up to the ceiling as if the right word hides there.

“Alive? Breathing?”

“Yes.” His face pinches, and after a moment, she recognizes it as a smile.

Sighing, she bends her knees to untie her boots. “I never got a chance to thank you. For saving my life. So—thanks. I can’t imagine—what it took you, to give—”

“Well,” he says. “Hmm.” He scratches his nose, and there it is again, that smile—fleeting, but warm as a bloom of flame in darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another short 'un. Buckle up for Thursday.


	6. i'll go mad

She finishes an afternoon’s work in the latrine with sore shoulders and feet hot in their boots, aching for the feeling of water on her skin—water sluicing over her, rinsing her clean. The sponge baths she takes now don’t satisfy: the basin and the rag, daubing at her dusty skin in the small dark room. She longs to feel quenched. That day Part told her another Fury had died, his half-life petering out in one last dry, rasping cough. And Toast came to her with plans to train the Furies properly—men and women both, War Boys, Wretched, breeders, anyone who wanted to learn to fire a gun and ride like hell, and she had to say no, not enough bullets, not enough guzz. She fixed the water pipes in the greenhouses but the plants shrivel and the damp rooms smell like decay.

The Mess is bustling with dinner. She stands in line with her little bowl, then sits alone, blowing across her spoonful of gruel. At least the stew is hot against the cool desert evening. Though when the guzz runs out there will be an end to that too; a chill will settle over the kitchens and they will resort to cooking in sunlight, or to no cooking at all. 

Her throat constricts. There has to be an end, a way out; there must be a way. She gazes across the hall. Even diminished there are so many of them, and though looking out she sees mouths to feed she also sees camaraderie: War Boys sitting with Wretched, the Milking Mothers freed and fully clothed, everyone fairly fed.

Stiffly, she gets to her feet. Steps onto the bench, then onto the table.

“May I have your attention.”

Amazing, how the hush ripples across the room, heads turning toward her. Oh, this is preposterous, she should get down now and retreat to her room.

She closes her eyes. Drags air into her lungs and raggedly expels it.

“As you may have noticed, food supplies are low.” Murmurs. She presses on. “Guzzoline supplies are low. Bullet supplies are low.” She looks out into the grim silence, manages a sardonic smile. “But at least we have water!”

Applause, scattered at first but fast gaining momentum. She suppresses a scowl. Still they need to see one person standing above them, making speeches, doling out rewards.

“My—people,” she says, and the room falls silent. “We have peace. We have a little food—for everyone. We have water, and our Sickery. And in our greenhouse we have the beginning of some future harvest.” Lies, spin, propaganda; there are so many faces in the crowd. “But we need trade goods, so we can get the food and supplies we need.

“Now. It goes without saying that we will not be trading people, or the milk of people. Those times are behind us. But we do need trade goods. I want each of you to think of what we might trade, and find me if you have an idea. Otherwise, I’ll be searching the storerooms. If you can bear the darkness, please join me by the main courtyard, tomorrow.” A ripple of talk. She longs to be alone. “Thank you.” 

Applause.

She gets down heavily and trudges to the stairwell. Ascends and makes her winding way through the rough-cut tunnels back home. In the anteroom, dusky-dark, she breathes a sigh of relief: the others are still in the Mess.

“Ah. Hello.”

Except for Max.

She runs a hand over the stubble on her head and briefly considers fleeing for the silence of her room. Instead she feels her way to the single stone table and fumbles the oil lamp into light. She doesn’t know why—it’s a waste of oil, surely—but tonight she wishes to indulge the perverse voice in her head that whispers _“Screw conservation”_ in sibilant, watery tones.

The dancing light of the lantern daubs Max in shades of gold: ruffled hair, tousled clothes, bright sparks off dark eyes. He’s sitting upright and looking comically sheepish about it.

“Well, well,” she says, raising an eyebrow.

He scratches his nose and looks down. “Felt good enough to sit, and—hate just lying….”

“I promise not to tell Cheedo.”

“Hm.” 

In the pause she unlaces her boots, wiggles her toes through the holes in her socks.

He coughs. “S’pose I should thank you, then—for, ah, hm. Saving my life.”

The chilly high-ceilinged room feels suddenly warm, and she smiles, and goes to sit by him on the cot. “Let’s see you move those fingers.”

Gingerly, he clenches his right hand into a fist, then relaxes it.

“Good. You’ll have to stretch if you want to regain full motion.” Sighing, she leans back against the wall and lets her eyelids flutter shut. “How’s Cheedo been?”

He hums. “Good. Nervous. Ah—thin.”

She shifts, reaches to unbuckle the prosthesis. “We’re all worn a little ragged.” She should reassign Cheedo, somewhere less stressful, but they need her kindness in the Sickery, her way with the Pups—

Max clears his throat. “Will you. Hm. Could you.” He’s looking at her, forehead wrinkled and brows raised. “Give me… give me a… job?” He frowns, scratches his chin. “Help. Could I help.”

“But you’re resting—”

He meets her eyes with a dry expression, as if to say, Get me off this cot or I’ll go mad.

“Sure,” she says, chuckling drily. “You know anything about cars?”

\---

She notices the warmth of him, first, and his discomfort second—thought whether at the physical contact or the indignity of being supported, she doesn’t know. She’s at his left side, her right arm strong around his waist, his left arm over her shoulders. Capable, at his other side, chatters amiably. His head is down, watching his feet, taking small careful steps as they totter down the stairs in the predawn light.

Cheedo would never have approved of this plan.

At last they reach the bottom. Toast is waiting with a wheelchair that she scrounged up from somewhere— mismatched tires, pipes lashed together with rags. They lower Max into the suspended canvas seat and he sighs. Looks up. She is glad they found the chair. Perhaps the walking was already too much for him, even with her arm around his waist. Frowning in gentle mockery of his solemnness, she gives him a terse nod. He smiles.

“Here,” Capable says, reaching for the handles.

“Ah ah ah…” He waves her away, gropes for the wheels.

“Max,” Capable starts to say, but Furiosa shakes her head. “Thank you both,” she says, and Toast and Capable accept the dismissal. When they have disappeared upstairs she quietly begins to push Max across the uneven sand courtyard to the Monkey Shop. Perhaps he has realized that with a shoulder injury, he stands no chance of wheeling himself; perhaps he knows better than to argue with an Imperator. Either way she feels a quiet glow of victory when his hands fall away from the wheels and rest in his lap.

She introduces him to Grease, sets him up at a parts table. Empties a bag of random bits across the stone and leans over the back of the chair, under pretense of reaching for a spare gear. Murmurs: “I know you can do more than sort parts and mend tires. But for now—“

He meets her eyes. Nods. When she leaves there is already a Pup by his side.

\---

Outside she finds a crowd gathering: her volunteers for the search through Joe’s storeroom, the network of passages that begin in the towers and extend deep into the dark beneath the stone and sand. Tortoise, former Milking Mother, has some knowledge of the catacombs. She divides the group into teams and gives each team a direction. “Be back here by noon,” she says, “or we’re coming to find you.”

The group fidgets, Wretched sizing up Furies, everyone eyeing the dark passage leading into the clammy blackness. Furiosa raises her metal arm skyward. “I don’t need to tell you that this is not a looting trip,” she says, voice low and resonant. “Joe did us all a great hurt, and I want us to prove that we can do better.” Her breath shudders and she swallows, hard. “Search well.”

She joins Fent, Toast’s apprentice half-life. He’s in bad shape—coughing and wheezing, sores all down the side of his neck. Together two of them descend. Tortoise gives them an oil lamp—a wick and a scum of oil, four hours’ worth, in a dirty brown bottle—and Furiosa walks behind with it in her metal hand, unhurt by the heat of the flame, watching the shadows dance long on the walls.

They check every turn and corner. In the dark of the catacombs the air is cool, even chilly. When the lamp begins to gutter they return to the surface. Tortoise plots their path on the map Cheedo painted on the wall, and records their findings: a handful of precious glass jars in one corner, a room full of moldering twine. A room with walls that sweat, out of proximity to the great well. Nothing more, in four hours’ walk through the dark.

They return after noon. Farther and farther, each foray, and Furiosa walks tall and grim with the lamp.

\---

That night at dinner she watches them bring Max into the Mess, chair wheeled by a pair of wide-eyed Pups, Capable chattering at his elbow. She watches him. He holds a tightness around his eyes, a tense press of the lips—overwhelmed by the echo of a hundred-odd people in the cavernous room. But his arms are speckled with motor oil and the briefest of smiles flickers across his face as the Pups cluster around him. The sight is almost—almost—enough to lighten her bleak mood.

\---

“Here, let me…” At the foot of the stairs, Capable reaches to lift him from the chair.

“Unh.” He flinches. “Feeling good. I can do it.”

Capable hovers as he eases out of the chair and rises slowly to his feet. “Go on then, Capable,” Furiosa says, and sighing, Capable climbs the stairs, looking over her shoulder at every other step. When she is gone Furiosa discreetly steps closer to him. Lets him put his good left arm over her shoulders for support. Discreetly, the way she herself would want. She pretends not to notice the way he hesitates before touching her, or the way he stares fixedly at the ground for the entire climb. She wonders if she herself has touched another person for so long in all the past five months. His breathing is labored and they pause often in the silky dark. Outside the anteroom door, he meets her eye and nods—all the thanks he can give, now, pained by his own weakness. She lets him walk in the door alone.

He is greeted by cheers, and Cheedo’s fussing, and it’s a wonder they don’t frighten him away, all these women, but he takes it placidly, and of course Dag hangs back, and Furiosa herself slips through the gaiety to the quiet of her own room.

\---

She and Fent find a long rusted chain in a tiny side room, the second day of searching, and as the oil burns low they drag it toward the surface.

“Could come in useful,” Fent says, wheezing.

Furiosa says nothing. Raises the lamp. There’s a face ahead, in the darkness: a gaunt, pale, angry face. Dag.

“They said I’d find you here,” she hisses savagely. “Busted pipe—water everywhere—“

“Grab some chain,” Furiosa says, and the three of them haul it upward, into the light.

\---

The pipe is indeed busted. Water showers to the ground and sends spilled soil and dead leaves sheeting across the greenhouse floor. Furiosa swaps it for a fresh one—newly unearthed, from their searching—a process that drenches her and the surrounding plants and Pups. It is deeply satisfying, the easy fix and the flow of water across her skin, the feeling of dampness. Less satisfying is Dag, bedraggled as a wet cat and—Furiosa realizes—red-eyed from crying.

“Go on, then,” she says to the Pups, gently; they scatter to their weeding and watering, glancing at her occasionally with huge round eyes. She turns to Dag. “Now. What’s wrong?”

Dag glares at her balefully.

Sighing, Furiosa kicks over a bucket and sits. It was a mistake, perhaps, pulling Tortoise away from the greenhouses to lead the search effort, leaving Dag to slog toward failure on her own. Every decision Furiosa makes seems to ripple outward. A solitary tear skates through the dust on Dag’s face and her eyes grow harder and angrier than before. Furiosa extends her good hand, takes Dag’s, squeezes it—

“I’m so tired!” Dag yells, and a shudder passes through the greenhouse as Pups duck under planters and behind boxes. “I’m so tired of being hungry! And stupid smig Pups and, and dirt under my fingernails—“ She wrenches away wildly, sends a planter swinging on its chain—“so tired of nothing growing, and—and Cheedo won’t shut up about Max!”

Ah. So that’s the problem.

Furious, Dag gives the planter an incredible shove, sending dirt and plants pouring out across the floor. That sets her crying harder and she collapses at Furiosa’s feet.

Sighing, Furiosa squats beside the Dag-shaped puddle. This is really not her forte; she’s never been much of a hand holder or shoulder-patter. And with Dag, perhaps that’s for the best. When the tears stop and the sullen face emerges, dirt-streaked and sniffling, Furiosa offers a corner of her scarf. They are so young, the Wives; she forgets.

“Look, Dag.” She sighs. “I can’t promise that the garden will work out, all right? I can’t promise that we’ll find anything to trade. I can’t promise that we won’t all starve tomorrow. But I promise this: in two weeks Max will not seem nearly so exciting.”

Dag rolls her tear-red eyes, hides her face behind the corner of Furiosa’s scarf.

“I’m serious. He’s either going to take off again or stick around long enough to get boring.”

“I don’t—it’s not—He’s fine, really.”

“Hmm.”

“No, really. I—like him.” She hisses the words as if they pain her. “He just—he’s a man. He’s not one of us.”

Furiosa smiles a tight-lipped smile.

Together, they move to right the planter. Stretching her sore back Furiosa watches as Dag kneels to gather the precious spilled earth. Watches as Dag grows very, very still. She looks threatened, almost; wary, as she extends a slender tattooed finger to prod at something in the earth. Something shockingly pale in the dark soil, fist-sized, tangled in the roots of the plant.

“Is it sick?” Dag murmurs.

A memory shifts and stirs, surfacing in Furiosa’s heart of green. Her mother, bending in a garden, and her own small eight-year-old hands sifting through the dirt, seeking the pale tubers…

“It’s a potato,” she says, and Dag, who has only known cooked potatoes, gazes at her with that steady hostile stare, so Furiosa repeats herself, and unburies the potato, takes a bite—still dusted with earth but moist and crisp and ready—and then there are a thousand rejoicings. For this plant is common in the greenhouse, has thrived; the strange plant that seemed to bear no fruit has nestled a secret bounty beneath the soil. Dag cries, messy-relief tears at her unexpected success, and Furiosa smiles. The milky-sweet raw potato tastes like a promise of more time.

\---

They come to her, after dinner. (Dinner supplemented by a scant ration of potatoes, fried in precious seed oil, three succulent slices per person.) At first, standing outside and gazing at the night, she registers them as half-size ghosts. They flit around her, the Pups; three four five of them. Capable would know their names.

Looking down, she watches with genial detachment as the tallest one is nudged forward by his friends. “Imper—um, Lady.” He burrows toe through the sand. “We want to help.”

“Oh?” she asks.

“Food. There’s bugs!”

“We hunt ‘em out before dawn,” says the tiniest Pup. “Bugs all over the sand!”

They all chime in.

“Sometimes if you dig a hole in the night they’ll fall in it—” “But you better come before the light or something else’ll get ‘em—” “I like the black ones, they’re crunchy—” “But we can’t eat spiders, Nux said—”

“Thank you,” Furiosa says solemnly. “Guess I should make a bug-gathering team before breakfast.”

Tiny whispers. She suppresses a smile. Then a consensus is reached; the biggest one steps forward. “We’ll do it, Lady!”

“Yeah, come out an’ gather them—”

“—take ‘em in to old Tarn—”

“Yeah, Tarn!”

“Thank you,” Furiosa says. 

Small beaming faces, in the dark.


	7. revelation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the tags I promised angsty stargazing, here 'tis...
> 
> Also, holy cow, thanks for the comments and kudos and everything. You all are so lovely.

She comes up out of the tunnel behind Fent, blinking in the afternoon sun. 

“Capable is organizing some sort of gathering tonight,” Tortoise says, marking their find (scrap metal, nothing more).

“Gathering?”

“Yeah. Up top. For all the… Cut?” Tortoise shrugs. “Everyone’s invited. Stargazing, or something.”

Furiosa raises a hand to shade her eyes. “Stargazing?”

“Yeah. You know—for fun?”

\---

She goes. Of course she goes. What choice does she have? But still she wonders, clomping up the endless stairs in her heavy boots, why she has left her peaceful solitude after a long day’s labor to join the stream of strangers chattering all around her. The Cut. Then the stairs deposit her on top of the column and she ceases wondering. 

The stars are so bright and so close that they seem like a gauzy curtain tossed across the void of the night, and though she feels their unfathomable distance as a breathless ache in her gut still it seems to her that if she stretched up an arm she could touch them. 

Slowly, she returns to Earth. Wretched murmur around her in awe—few have climbed to the top of the tower before. She watches a young woman whisper in her baby’s ear and raise a hand to point at the stars, and for the first time in a while Furiosa lets herself think of Splendid who was lost. Splendid would like this, the odd poetry of it, the hushed conversation, a hundred people beneath the jeweled vault of sky.

“Lady!” Toast, out of nowhere. “Join us.” 

Capable has spread blankets for their little group: Toast, Cheedo, a reluctant Dag, and—Max. How did he get up here? There is no wheelchair in sight. She lowers herself to the blanket beside him, registers his nod of greeting just visible by starlight. 

The women talk. She shivers, and draws one of Capable’s blankets around her. “No chair, hm?”

A flash of teeth in darkness: his smile. She could get used to it.

“I bet Cheedo wasn’t happy.”

“Mm.”

Silence. She lies back, eventually, rests her head on blankets, her eyes on the shimmer above.

\---

“Furiosa.” 

She starts awake. Stars—voices—Max. Has he said her name before? They are rising—it is time to go inside. Dazed, she watches as Capable offers a hand to Max. He shakes his head and stands unsteadily. Capable gasps and he grins; Furiosa catches the gleam of starlight in his eyes. Then he turns to her, still lying on the ground. Bends carefully, to offer her his good hand.

She takes it—warm and rough—when last did someone help her to stand like this? Disoriented as she is from her nap, there’s something certain in the grip that warms her, the assurance of balance as she gets to her feet.

The hand disappears as discreetly as it was offered. He walks to the stairwell, following the last sleepy Pups, and she finds herself watching his form: the cautious steps, the set of the shoulders—

She desires him.

The thought wrings her, rends her, makes her wince. Somehow it crept up on her—somehow, in his easy silence, in his rare smiles—somehow she didn’t notice. But now she knows it, an animal knowing that cleaves to her core, and she doesn’t think that she will ever shake this feeling, this clench of Want.

“Fury?” It’s Toast. “Are you ok?”

No, she is not okay, because she knows with the same intensity that he does not Want, or at least not her—he who shrinks away, he of the closed face and tight-drawn lips, he does not want her.

She nods at Toast and stumbles down the stairs.

\---

The morning dawns cold. She feels stiff and ill-used, and for the first time since the searches began she avoids the catacombs, lets her feet carry her to the Monkey Shop instead. Together, she and Grease work on the new Rig: the vehicle that will carry her to Gastown, should they ever find trade goods. The new Rig rattles and creaks; it is cobbled together from bits and ends, not nearly so sleek as its predecessor. Yet by the afternoon it purrs when started, the steady drawl of a well-tended motor. Still she finds more things to fix, more adjustments to make, until at last she is tweaking the gas gauge with a tiny hex wrench.

“Lay up on that or you’ll break it,” Grease says.

She grits her teeth, cranks the wrench. 

Grease frowns. “It doesn’t need to be so tight, Fury.”

The slender wrench snaps in her hand.

“Take your bike out, why don’t you,” Grease says, looking at her closely.

“What about the guzz?”

He shrugs.

Scowling, she finds herself settling into the saddle. A second indulgence. Roaring out of the Monkey Shop, she savors the rush of wind, the feel of cleansing by speed. The hum of the engine drowns out the chaos in her head.

Back in the Shop she dismounts. “Tank’s almost empty.”

“And so,” Grease says, “are we.”

It takes a moment for her to grasp his meaning. “The Rig—is she—”

“Yeah, she’s full,” Grease says, shrugging. “And Tera’s bike. As for the rest—”

“Why did you let me ride?” she snaps.

“What else was I to do with you?” he says, and shrugs at her anger. “Biting my head off will only prove my point.”

“Well.” She buries her face in her hands and tries to recall the sensation of wind on skin. “Well. We’ll have to get moving, is all.”


	8. run for your life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is so angsty that I felt angsty just reading it over. Sorry (jk not sorry)

Climbing the stairs that evening with the ache of the day in her calves and shoulders and spine, she considers. Things cannot continue this way: snapping at Grease, joyriding. She cannot sulk like a lovelorn teenager. 

How do adults resolve these things?

She and Valkyrie were lovers of a sort, long ago. But they were young—and it was strictly casual—and times were different then, in the Green Place. Since then, what? A couple one-night stands, if that? Joe’s regime did not lend itself to free love. After all, there had been—well.

Reflexively her hand brushes across the surgical scars on her belly. What would they signify to a man? She does not tend to look at herself, much less search for stray scars on a body already much lined and roughened by a life lived hard. And there lies another question: what has she to attract another? She runs her hand over her short-cropped hair, flexes the metal fingers. No. There could be no elaborate game in it, not for her; no flirting or playing, no drawn-out pursuit. She would have to be direct—

She pauses on a landing, breathing from the climb. What is she thinking? That she will go to Max and tell him? What is there to say? ‘Come to my bed.’

She pictures his response. The blank face, eyes suddenly wary: all trust gone. And the next morning, or even that night, a bike missing from the Monkey Shop; a lone tire track winding out across the sand. Capable’s anxious voice: “But why did he go?”

No. There will be no confession; she will control her impulses, and leave him to heal in peace. It is the logical decision, the mature decision, the right decision.

Then why, as she climbs the stairs, is there this wrenching pressure in her chest?

She can hear laughter through the door. Inside, a game of cards: Dag and Toast versus Capable and Cheedo. Max, seated on the couch, watches. He looks up at her entrance and smiles, and heat flushes her neck like the sudden rise of a sandstorm. She considers striding straight to her room to hide. But that would be a child’s surrender, and so she joins him on the sofa.

How well the four Wives look. Cheeks a little more sunken, perhaps, now that they are no longer fed specially. But they each have lost something, a certain haggard look in the eyes; and gained something new. She notes a smudge of dirt on the end of Dag’s nose, and the way she grins at the game.

“Um.” 

Furiosa turns to look at him.

“Um. How, uh, was your day?”

“Making small talk now, are we?” It comes out more bitter than she had intended. She shouldn’t take out her frustration on him—“Sorry. I, ah, got some bad news.”

He tilts his head, and she curses internally. She hadn’t meant to share this, but—“We’re nearly out of guzz.”

He stiffens.

“Don’t repeat that, eh? I probably shouldn’t have told you.”

“Supply run soon.”

“Yes. If we ever find something to trade.”

“ _When_ we find something.” That smile again: fleeting, bright.

“All this time I thought it would be the food that gave out first. But now—thanks to Dag’s potatoes—”

“Um.” Max looks suddenly urgent. “Uh. Um.”

“What?”

“I was going to tell you later,” Dag says, quietly. The game falls still. “But there’s some sort of bug in the potatoes, and—we don’t have so many.” She picks at her fingernails, expressionless.

Furiosa shuts her eyes. This is it: the first rumblings of the rockslide.

“Hold on.” Toast’s voice cuts through the clatter in her mind. “I was reading earlier, and I had an idea.”

“What?” Capable lays a hand on Furiosa’s shoulder.

“Books.”

“Huh?”

“We trade the books.”

“No,” Dag hisses.

“That whole library Joe gave us,” Toast says. “I know it’s precious to us, but that’s the point. It’s all we have left.”

“But,” Cheedo says. “That’s all we have of—of Miss Giddy—and, and Splendid—”

“Would Miss Giddy want us to starve?” Toast asks. “Would Splendid want us to die, stranded here without guzz?”

“But—”

“Toast is right,” Furiosa says. “We leave the day after tomorrow. We trade the books.”

“But—”

Furiosa presses her hand over her eyes as the crash of falling rock fills her mind. “Look,” she growls. “If anyone has a better idea, you’ll have to tell me tomorrow.” She stands, tugging at a strap of the prosthesis. “Goodnight.”

She has almost reached the blessed silence of her room when she hears uneven footsteps behind her. 

“Furiosa.” He winces apologetically. “—Lady.”

“Call me Fury.” 

“Fury.” He smiles, then looks at his feet, face returning to tension. “I can’t drive, and it’s been, um, a month? since I, ah, fired a gun. But.” He looks her in the eye. “Can I come?”

“On the supply run?”

He nods.

“Hm.”

He looks at her steadily. What of his wounds? Will he help or hinder? Or will he hurt himself? The bubble of pleasure she first felt at his offer bursts and she is suddenly, viciously angry that he would ask her, now, when she is so clearly distressed. It is one decision too many—the exhaustion of the day strikes her, and she sways on her feet.

There is a hand on her shoulder—briefly, too briefly, just enough for her to feel his stability, standing before her: the rootedness of him, somehow, that belies his injured leg, that balances her. Then his hand withdraws and once more she is left standing, steady but alone.

“Well. I guess you’d better come along.”


	9. the heat of it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some action to break up the angst.

All the next day, they prepare, and she turns the plan over in her mind. Gastown is an unknown. Who is the leader, now that the People Eater is dead? Will they welcome trade as Max surmised? Or will they show hostility to the woman who killed their king? Will she bring back the guzz they need? Will she survive?

But despite this uncertainty she is glad for the motion. There’s an energy to the preparations, and she feels she has strode in from the shifting desert sands to firm ground again: here she is confident, here she can lead. She has headed supply runs before.

Of the wives, only Toast and Capable will join her; plus Fent and a handful of other Furies, men and women both. Tera will come, of course, on the last bike with guzz in its tank. Toast supervises the gathering of ammunition, discusses motorized combat with Tera and the Furies: they hope for a peaceful mission, but Furiosa does not tend to optimism. Grease checks and double-checks the small rig’s runnings, and Cheedo flits about—for what purpose, Furiosa doesn’t know. 

They will leave in the early morning, it is decided, so as to arrive at Gastown in the light of day with a white flag raised. With luck they should return to the Citadel at nightfall.

At last the precious cargo is rag-wrapped and secured in back of the rig. Pulling her scarf up over her nose, Furiosa shouts a final order to the Furies and strides to the cockpit—

Swirls of white and black and grey swathe the front of the rig in interlocking strokes of paint. At first they look like flames, but after a moment they resolve into leaves and vines and flowers, winding over and around the rig as though blown backward by the wind. Her usual skeletal arm is there, forever pointing onward from the driver’s side, but this time charcoal-black words stand dark behind the bones: TO THE GREEN PLACE. 

She runs a hand over the just-dried lettering. 

“It’s a rig to come home in,” Cheedo says.

For a moment Furiosa regards the woman-child beside her, paint-splattered Cheedo, forever unsure. Then she reaches to lay a hand on the nape of Cheedo’s neck, pulls their foreheads together for the span of two breaths.

“We’ll be back by nightfall.”

“You’d better be,” Cheedo says, quavering.

Furiosa slings herself up into the seat. Pauses, to trail her fingers through the grease on the wheel stem and smear her forehead black. She flicks the switches for the ignition code—same as ever, but now common knowledge among the entire crew—and brings the engine to life, steering the Green Rig out onto the open road.

A ragged cheer goes up from the Cut behind them, and she hears Fent’s answering whoops from directly overhead. Toast, chieftess of the lancing crew, gives a grumble clearly audible even from inside, and Max chuckles from the passenger seat, gun across his knees.

“Well,” she says. “Looks like we’re back on the Fury Road.”

\---

She never really knows a rig until she’s driven it for miles, until she’s felt the way the engine shifts and settles going into a curve, until she’s fought from behind its wheel. This rig she has driven no more than once around the Citadel, testing. Now, with the open expanse of road stretching straight and dry as bone to the dull blot of Gastown on the horizon, she relaxes into the seat, loosens her grip on the wheel. 

“Your knife,” Max says, and she smiles, because of course the bone-handled knife serves as the gearshift in this rig as well. And of course Max would notice.

“Let’s hope you’re not taking it to my lungs anytime soon, huh?”

He chuckles, staring out the passenger window, and she has to bite back a sudden memory of him in the passenger seat of a different rig on the long ride to the Green Place; her first bubbling, cautious hope.

She hadn’t thought to share the cab with him alone, but Toast and the Furies are up top and Capable rides behind Tera on the bike. She wonders if he feels it too, ghosts of their last ride on the Fury Road. If for him, as for her, that ride marked the death of an old self and the rising of a new, or if for him it was just another turn on a life of many detours.

Then he looks at her, give her a faint smile—an isn’t it funny we’re going into battle together again kind of smile—and she remembers the camaraderie they shared in that drive. The easy silences.

She drives, straight and true and fast toward Gastown.

\---

Heat in the desert comes on gradually, creeping up stealthily for the attack: the sun striking at your eyes, the hot crushing pressure that squeezes the sweat from your body, the raking dust that claws at lips and nose. It is nearly noon and Gastown looms, a tangle of dark pipes jutting up from the sand as a fence of sorts, slow-bobbing oil pump jacks and the occasional draught of flame visible beyond the pipe fence. At this distance the row of pipes is still indistinct and she cannot tell if there are figures moving along them or if the shapes are a trick of her sun-beaten eyes. Above the walls and bobbing pump jacks the sky has an oily-grey sheen. She slows the rig, pulls the horn once.

“Peace places!” Toast shouts, and Furiosa feels a drag on the small rig as the white rag-flag is winched upright. Furies scuffle and shout, hunkering down into the war blinds atop the rig. She watches in the mirror as Tera pulls the bike in close beside.

The empty fuel pod rattles furiously behind them as they decelerate down the final stretch of road. The gate rears: pipes soldered together into a twisted black mass, effectively blocking their passage. She glimpses flashes of white at the top and realizes, with a rapid falling sensation in her stomach, that there are human skulls woven into the tangle of pipes like beads. “That wasn’t here in the People Eater’s time.”

Max grunts. “Classy.”

She squints to peer between the pipes into Gastown itself. Cuts the engine.

Fent, from the top: “Lady, do we have a plan?”

“Down, fool!” Toast hisses.

They wait.

There is a long shrill creak, the high-pitched wail of angry metal, and the tangled-pipe gate parts in the middle, two halves folding inward to clear their path. The gate settles open; the squealing stops. Inside the compound, the road widens into an arena of sorts, a turn-around point for long rigs. A tall building stands directly across from them, smaller buildings slumped around it. She scans back and forth, searching for any sign of life. Someone let them in. But who?

Silence.

They wait.

“Ambush,” Max says.

She lets her breath hiss out between her teeth, raises a hand to brush at the oily sweat trickling along her jawline. Heat shimmers on the road ahead. “You would think they’d send a party out to greet us in peace.”

He grunts in agreement, not asking the obvious question: if they intend to attack, why haven’t they?

She reaches for the ignition and is startled when he stops her hand. “Let me go out first.”

“What?”

“With all our fighters up top the rig—we, ah, don’t know if they’ve got snipers in there. If they’re on top the buildings, our Furies would be, um, sitting ducks.”

“Yeah, and suppose you go out there and the hypothetical snipers shoot you.”

He chuckles. “Then you turn around and drive like hell.”

“Max.”

“What do you want, Lady? We came expecting a greeting, either bullets or, ah, a peace flag. We can’t send the rig in there.”

She bites the inside of her cheek, resists the urge to scream. _This is what you get for loving in a ruined world._ “Fine.”

She pulls the horn twice, quickly— _Be alert_ —and watches as he swings the door open, hops down with a wince. He leaves the rifle in the cab.

Arms raised, he steps through the gate. “Hello?”

A single sharp crack. She watches as he doubles over, gripping the outside of his thigh. Instantly she hears an answering crack from the top of the rig. A scream from the building opposite; a figure plummets from an upper story, arms and legs pinwheeling in the air. She flinches when it lands. Somewhere above her, Toast clicks her tongue in satisfaction.

Max turns, limps frantically back to the rig; heaves himself into the seat. Seeing her face, he harrumphs. “’S a scratch, really.” She looks away when he bends to staunch the gash.

Inside the gate, the dirty road is still. No life flickers in the buildings. The pump jacks move up and down, up and down, listlessly. She turns the ignition.

Silence from the compound. On the oily sand below the building, the figure is visible only as a dark blot on the sand.

She noses the rig within the gate. Pauses for a count of ten, then pulls the horn three times. _All clear._

Instantly the rig comes alive. Furies bound down from the top, armed and curious. Capable runs to the side window. “Max—”

“I’m fine.”

“Oh.” She pauses, looks at Furiosa for a frantic second, then turns and dashes to the blot on the sand.

Frowning, Furiosa slips out of the rig and strides over to Tera. “What do you think?”

“Either infighting took all but one of ‘em out after the People Eater’s death, or… there’s another force coming.” She looks around at the slow pump jacks, still bringing guzz by the gallon up from the soil, and cackles.

Furiosa turns. “Travel in pairs! Take what you can find! We want food first of all, guzz second! And I want everyone back within the hour!”

“Within the hour?” Toast’s forehead crinkles. “This is a gold mine.” 

“A gold mine with only one guardian? I don’t like it.” She opens the passenger door, looks up at Max. “Can you sit in the driver’s seat?”

He nods and clambers over the gearshift, wincing.

“If you see anything funny—anything at all—pull that horn like a madman.”

He chuckles. “Loot well, Lady.”

She shuts the door and stands, momentarily at odds. “Tera—”

“Yes, Lady?”

“Let’s go see about Capable.” She sighs. “Toast, come.”

They take off at a trot, even as a pair of Furies drags the pod away to be filled. Already a pair has returned, hauling a canvas sack that clanks like metal. “Food first!” Toast barks, and they drop it, guiltily. “If there even is any food in this wasteland,” Toast mutters.

When they arrive at Capable’s side they find the body broken, a dark sheen of blood on the sand around it. Capable crouches, tears cutting lines through the dust on her face as Tera pats her shoulder uncomfortably. “We said no needless kills—”

“They shot at Max,” Toast says.

“And Max once shot at Splendid—”

Furiosa sighs and looks up at the building. It is the tallest of all the buildings, built of mud daub and metal pipes, a bedraggled tower with square windows gaping like vacant eyes. She runs a hand over her close-cropped hair.

“Well,” Toast says, and slings a leg in through a low window.

Inside, it is dark and close, the ceiling scarcely above Furiosa’s head. The room is filled with wreckage and a heavy, sweaty, hot smell. It takes her a moment to recognize it as the stench of decaying flesh. 

Beside her, Toast gags, then forces her face into blankness. “Let’s get this done.” As Toast mounts the ladder to the second level Furiosa leans to examine the bodies. Three of them, twisted and unrecognizable, clearly killed in combat, perhaps a week dead. Their flesh is bloated and bizarre, and she sees beetles scuttle beneath them at the impact of her footfalls. Strange, such recent signs of conflict, when it has been months since the People Eater died, months for Gastown to settle into some sort of new regime…

She goes to the threshold. There are footprints here, in the sand just by the door.

Stepping into the blinding sun, she kneels to examine them. Most recent and clear are those of the woman, coming in with the wide-spaced steps of a person on the run. She must have triggered the gate somewhere, and then run up here—for what? To kill them? To steal their food?

A shudder runs down her spine. This is a fool’s errand. There is no food here and her entire party will die. She half stands, then forces herself to crouch again—for if they return now to the Citadel there will be no more guzz in the rig’s tank for the longer run to the Bullet Farm. Better to let the Furies fill the pod—better to let them search—

Under the woman’s are the tracks of two people coming in—and coming out. There, clear, a boot print leading out from the doorway, not two day’s old.

They are not the first to visit this place.

She stands and steps back into the building. Calls up to Toast: “Hurry!”

She is opening her mouth to call again when she hears the long, urgent blare of the rig’s horn.

_Max._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Yes, Max’s injury is intended to parallel Splendid’s.  
> -A pump jack is a big, bobbing, oil-pumping thing like in [this picture.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpjack#/media/File:Pump_Jack.jpg)  
> -I recently discovered that the [badass warrior vengeance goddesses of Greek myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erinyes) were called Furies. I didn’t name Fury or her Furies after them but it is a glad coincidence, no?


	10. a shot resounds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight tag change.

The rig’s horn echoes off the low mud buildings and slow-moving pump jacks. She runs for the window, leaping over the bodies. Gunshots; with her head low, she peers out the window.

The gate is closing, slow and ominous, and she can see figures dodging among the jagged row of pipes that serves as Gastown’s wall. Max and Tera return fire from the rig while Furies duck and scramble their way up top. As she watches, Capable pulls the bike out from behind the shelter of the rig and revs across the hard-packed earth to a pair of Furies who are struggling.

“Go! Go!” hisses Toast from behind her. She vaults through the window, wincing as her lungs complain, and darts erratically to the rig. A patter of bullets hisses into the sand beside her.

When they reach the rig Max pulls his gun in from the window, clicks through the start pattern. Nods at her. She wonders how he remembers it, across the gulf of the months, but the rig is moving and there’s no time for reminiscing—ahead, Capable and the last two Furies struggle toward them. There is a sack, she realizes, an unwieldly weight of canvas slung across the bike, barely supported.

Bullets crack into the rig and she hears a yelp from up top. Ahead, one of the Furies buckles and Capable shrieks. Max guns the rig and it leaps forward, sheltering Capable and the bike from the barrage.

“Hurry—hurry—hurry—” Furiosa kicks the passenger door open and seizes the sack. It is heavy—for a moment it slips in her hands—then Capable gives a mighty heave from below and Furiosa wrenches it into the cab. Scowling, Capable pulls her goggles down and peels away from the rig, the last Fury clinging behind her on the bike. Engine shuddering, the rig tears after them.

“There must be a back exit,” Furiosa says through gritted teeth. “We just need to get to it before they do.” She seizes a rifle from the back, rolls down her window.

“Bump ahead,” Max grunts, and the rig jostles wildly as they bounce across piping in the road. When it steadies she thrusts her torso out the window and takes two good shots behind them. In the chaos of their retreat she can see only a few bedraggled figures ducking around the pipes fence, but the volley of gunfire continues. Toast grinds out orders overhead as the Furies return the assault.

A shot resounds from beside them. “Biker,” Max says, and she sees it through his side window—a lean, gritty little bike with a rag-wrapped figure atop it, ducking and jumping through the wasteland of pipelines and oil jacks, racing for whatever back entrance they seek. A Rock Rider.

“Get that window down,” Furiosa growls, and Max obeys, grimacing as he winches the window down with one hand. “Steady now,” she says, and he ducks a little, and she shoots, the report ringing in the tiny cabin. The rider darts along as before.

“Shit,” Furiosa mutters, aiming again and firing, then wrestling another bullet into the chamber.

“Eyes ahead,” Max says. She turns to the windshield.

As she watches, Capable sends the bike careening down a side road, braids flying, the Fury clinging to her even tighter. Max follows, and the terrain grows immediately bumpier as they weave between pump jacks and the standing pipes that spit occasional gouts of flame.

They are out of range of the figures at the gate, now, but she hears a shot clap out from the left. “Our friend the biker—”

“Still with us,” Max mutters.

Ahead, Capable accelerates, whipping around a pump jack. Furiosa at last sees where she’s aiming: a gap in the fence, a space among the hell of pumps and pipes and oily smoke where the rig might just shoot through, out into the freedom of the wasteland.

But even as her heart thrills with hope she hears a telltale rattling from behind. They are bounding over difficult terrain, now, and the fuel pod is working its way loose.

She hears Toast’s low voice from the top of the rig. “Cover me.” A shot; a brief shout of pain. The rattling stops. They jounce over the last patch of broken ground and onto the great flat Waste. 

She watches in the mirror as Gastown pulls away behind them, the Rock Rider screeching to a halt in the gap of the fence. Max swings the rig around toward the Citadel, and the Furies’ whoops rise like a tattered pennant of war.

In a minute they are back on the Fury Road, and she sighs in relief at the sudden smoothness of passage. 

“Hold steady,” she says to Max, and waits for his tense nod before she thrusts herself out the window, toe jamming in the interior foothold, hands clawing for purchase on the low rooftop railing before she hauls herself up.

On top, the Furies are a ragged band. Two are wounded; Tera, dour but miraculously unharmed, tends to both. “The girlie’s at the back,” she says, seeing Furiosa.

Furiosa works her way cautiously back to the fuel pod, giving terse smiles to the Furies who cling, exhausted and exhilarated, to the top of the rig. She finds Toast crouched by the fuel pod, cradling her side.

“Toast—”

“I’m fine, it’s just a graze, I’m fine. Just a graze. No problem.” Toast doesn’t meet her eyes.

“That may be. But we’re going to get you into one of the gunports anyway—” Furiosa reaches for her.

“Don’t touch me.”

Furiosa freezes. When Toast takes hold of the prosthesis on her own, Furiosa guides her gently across the treacherous rig top to the shelter where Tera is ministering. She can see the blood seeping through Toast’s clothing. It isn’t just a graze. “I’m fine,” Toast repeats. “Go and see about Max.”

“Toast—”

“He can’t drive forever on that leg. Go.”

She remembers, then, that Max was hit, in the very first conflict before the Rock Riders arrived. “Shit.” Scrambling for purchase, she returns to the front of the rig, lowers herself through the window. “Max. Your leg.”

He grunts but makes no complaint when she gestures him out of the driver’s seat, and it strikes her vividly that though she seems to have gotten most of her crew out safe they are not yet home—

“Kick in the accelerator and crawl over here, I’ll take the wheel—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, just stop the fucking rig and swap places,” Toast growls from outside, and Furiosa suddenly, inappropriately, chuckles. 

“We have done this maneuver before, you know.”

Max manages a grin, then, and kicks in the accelerator, and pulls himself painfully over the gear shift while she holds the wheel—struck by the closeness of him, his solidity even in pain, in crisis. When she drops into the driver’s seat she yanks the horn, just once, and flexes her metal fingers against the wheel.

“Well,” says Max, and exhales. “We made it.”


	11. redemption

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Four comments last chapter? Folks, it was like a secular, post-apocalyptic Christmas all up in my inbox. Here in the U. S. we celebrate Thanksgiving this Thursday, so here's my premature thanks: thank you, MMFR fan, for all that you do, for the kudos that you leave and the works that you write. I'm so glad to have this fandom to poke about in, full of feminists and car chases and hidden springs in the desert. Thanks for sharing it with me.

The Citadel is a seed-sized bump on the horizon when Max clears his throat.

“I missed this,” he says, his voice gravelly.

“Driving like hell with a hole in your leg?”

He chuckles. “I missed—you.”

She glances sideways and finds him looking square at her with one eyebrow quirked, a “what are you going to do about it” expression. Laughing, she feels the first unfurling of a fragile butterfly hope. “You just like driving beside a woman who could kick your ass.”

“Hmm.” He stares out the window, hiding a smile. “One who has before, if I, ah, remember right.”

“Yeah, yeah. Overall I’m glad that shotgun wasn’t loaded.”

“So you missed me too.”

She smirks. Is this flirting? Is that what they are doing? “Course I missed you. That’s why the first thing I did, when you showed up again, was smash both the front windows of your car.”

He laughs and she feels a little of the day’s desperation lift from her shoulders. They are driving. They survived.

\---

The rig pulls into the Citadel at last. In the central clearing stand Cheedo, Dag, Part, a crowd of Cut, and Grease—arms crossed over his chest, trying his utmost not to look concerned. The crowd parts before her until she rolls to a stop in front of the Sickery. Pushing open the door, she shouts, “We mourn our Fury, Carnax, who died in battle.”

Murmurs among the crowd, and then a ragged yell raised by the former War Boys. 

“And we thank our Furies for their service. For we return with guzz!” 

How easy they come to her, the cadences of the Imperator. There is shouting, now, and whooping. Dag pushes through to the front. 

“Food? Did you get food?”

“I don’t know, Dag. It was a hasty retreat.” She turns to Cheedo. “Toast, Max, Sand, and Fent are hurt. We need to get them off the rig and into the Sickery.” She gestures Grease to the full fuel pod. 

“Overall,” Toast mutters as Part lifts her down from the rig, “things could have gone better. May the Allmother help us when we need guzz again.”

When the wounded are settled in their beds, when the fuel pod is secreted away in the Monkey Shop, when Dag has helped a limp Capable up to the chambers, Tera and Furiosa open the rig.

The back is woefully hollow: a sole sack of pipe fittings lies slumped on the floor, its side torn, a few fittings rolling across the bottom. In a carefully-packed box placed close to the cab are the books: their precious trade goods, untraded.

“At least we got the guzz,” Tera says, shrugging.

Furiosa feels like turning and vomiting into the sand. The death of a Fury, and four more wounded—“Why didn’t we raise the flag, when the Rock Riders arrived? We should have returned these pipes and asked to trade fairly.”

“If you don’t recall,” Tera drawls, “they were shooting at us. Even with the flag raised as it was.”

“The Rock Riders were never our enemies—”

“Until you went back on your deal with them and left Joe’s army gnashing its teeth in their ravine?”

Furiosa slumps against the tailgate of the rig.

“Fury.” Capable hovers over her, laying a hand on her forehead, loosening the straps of her prosthesis where they chafe.

“I thought you went upstairs.”

“Well, I came back down.”

“Mm.” Furiosa wipes her face with her hand and is startled when it comes away blackened with war paint.

“No one else could have done what you did. No one else could have led us through that, brought out so many alive.”

“As I recall, I followed you.” She aims for a smile and manages a humorless smirk.

“You drove the rig. You shouted the commands.”

She shudders in the late-afternoon heat, irritated at the sudden stinging in her eyes.

“Lady, I think you need to come see this.”

She follows Capable around to the side of the rig. Cheedo’s lovely painting is now pinged by bullet marks and she traces one with her finger before Capable heaves the side door open.

There, in the footwell, Capable’s sack—rescued at the last minute and forgotten in the rush. Capable pulls it toward them, reaches into the opening. Small round pellets spill out across her hand. “I think they’re—seeds.”

Furiosa touches them with a single finger. “Lentils.”

“Lentils?”

“A good solid grain,” Tera says, standing beside them. “Filling. And they sprout—”

“Lentils,” Capable says. Then shouts it: “Lentils!”

Furiosa looks at the bag, the great bulging weight of it that tore at her shoulders when she hauled it up, the rent from a bullet hole in one side. “Where did you find this?”

“In a little underground vault,” Capable said. “There were more, but we could only lift one—even with the three of us—Where are you going?”

“To get the Dag,” Furiosa says, and grins.

\---

From atop the tower she watches evening gather in shades of purple and orange far out above the western mountains. Her skin is freshly clean; the bikes’ tanks are full; and somewhere Dag, exuberant, is tucking the first lentils into moist soil. Furiosa breathes, feeling the blush of this small victory prickle in her damaged lungs. From this height she can see the first fragile green of the test plantings atop the towers, and the greenhouse, its panes glinting in the fading sun.

“Hey.” Max, also clean, graze freshly bound, limps toward her. She smiles at the cowlick in his damp hair.

Color pools above the mountains. He sits stiffly beside her and together they watch the night fall and the stars poke through overhead. At last, when the desert chill bites at her and not even the trapped sun-heat of the rocks beneath warms her enough, she heaves herself to her feet.

Standing above him at the edge of the tower, she resists the impulse to ruffle his hair, wondering a moment at this strange sensual desire. She wants to touch him the way she aches for the sluice of cool water over her skin, or the way she wanted to sink her hand in the bag of lentils and feel the cool seeds slip through her fingers. It isn’t a sexual desire, though—well. She flushes like the sunset at that thought. But she also longs to touch him idly, fingertips brushing across the stubble on his cheek or the scarred skin of his shoulder, thumb stroking the curve of his ear as they lay beside each other in the gentle light of dawn—

She bites her lip savagely and composes herself. 

Max turns to her and she offers him her hand. Is it in her mind, or does he look at her as if he understands something deeper in the gesture? But no—that is wishful thinking. He takes her hand and she braces herself as he stands, wincing a little, until they face each other in the almost-dark at the top of the tower. She watches him, and he meets her gaze unabashed. Then he draws her hand to him. She registers the soft pressure of his lips against her palm as a frisson through her entire body, and when he releases her she steps close, takes the nape of his neck in her hand, pulls him against her.

The kiss tastes of dust and sweat and starlight. Her world contracts, and in all the wide starswept landscape she smells only him, feels only the pull of his lips against hers and the warmth of his arms holding her so gently and cautiously that she feels cradled rather than caught.

Then he buckles a little, breaking away with a grunt. He puts his hand to his knee and looks up at her sheepishly. “Damned leg.”

“The one that got shot, or the one that got chewed on?”

He grins. In the dark she senses the heat of him standing in front of her.

“Hm. We should, ah, probably head in.”

“Before it gets even darker and we accidentally stumble off the edge?”

“Mm.”

Reluctantly, she turns to the sunken doorway.

“Can I, ah—”

He places a hand on her shoulder and she steps back to wrap an arm around his waist, shoring him up. Side by side, taking their time, they make their way to the door.

\---

She helps him to his cot in silence. Alone in her room she goes to the narrow window and leans out, eyes closed. The breeze off the desert still carries the scent of the day’s heat, and she stands there for a long time with the wind playing against her smile and her heart burning.


	12. interlude: aflame

She wakes late the next morning, dizzy and confused, and lies for a time counting her breaths in her narrow bed of rags. Furiosa is battle-hardened, sharp of sight and of reflex: she trusts her senses, trusts her memories. She does not doubt that the kiss occurred. But still she wonders at it, a gesture so sweet and innocent between two people so toughened and scarred. This is Max, after all—the same Max who went away from the Rig into the darkness and returned covered in blood—(Max who handed her the rifle, who let her aim from his shoulder in the dark)—but of course, who better for her to kiss than this Max. Max, who can load a gun with one hand and steer with the other, who teaches the girls card games by lamplight, Max who is trailed by Pups like a covey of admiring ghosts as he limps about the Monkey Shop.

She pictures the easy way he loaded the gun, and writhes a bit in the narrow bed.

Later, when she makes her way to the common room, she is both disappointed and relieved to find Max absent; only Capable waits for her, holding out a steaming bowl.

“Fury! How do you feel?”

“Fine.” She smiles. “Quite well.”

“Really? After the raid, I thought you might be—”

Oh yes, the raid. “I have done this before.” 

“Of course.” 

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine.” Capable unplaits one of her long braids. “Seeing Carnax die beside me—I don’t think I’ll ever un-see it. But.” She shrugs, as if to say, _life goes on, and this isn’t the first trauma I’ve endured._

“And Toast?”

“She’s alive,” Capable says. “Bullet missed the important bits. Part says she’ll pull through. She’s already bored of bed rest, though.”

Furiosa chuckles. Brave Toast. “What’s this?” she says, cradling the warm bowl in her hand.

“Lentils,” Capable says. “Tarn cooked just a few of them, so we could get a tiny taste. We all tried a bite, Tarn and Dag and Tera and me. But we saved the rest for you.”

Cautiously, Furiosa raises the spoon to her mouth as Capable chatters on. “Tera says they’re rich with fiber and protein. And they’re filling, too. I had just a bite, but I felt—” She falters, watching Furiosa chew the savory lentils, and Furiosa offers the bowl.

“Thanks,” Capable says. Good Capable, not like Toast the grim or Cheedo the self-sacrificing who would have pushed the bowl back to her and increased her guilt a hundred-fold. “Anyway,” Capable continues through a mouthful of the stew, “Dag is just ecstatic. With that many seeds to try sprouting she can experiment a little. I think she put some straight in the ground and she’s trying soaking some others in water first, one of the books said something about that.”

The lentils are plump and satisfying to chew, meat-like in their savor. “Thank you for finding them.”

“Carnax did,” Capable says, and they share the last spoonfuls in silence.

\---

Search parties are still descending into the depths of Joe’s catacombs; Lydda still leads the latrine project; doubtless there is repair work to be done in the greenhouse. Furiosa blinks in the mid-morning sunlight and, after a breath of indecision, walks to the Monkey Shop.

Inside the cool stone cavern she finds Grease bending over the Green Rig. “Do you take pleasure in this?” he growls, gesturing to the side door pinged with bullet holes. “You know the amount of body work we’ve got to do now? And that sweet girl’s painting all screwed up, too.”

“Mm.”

“And now you’re probably going to waste that nice new guzz by taking your damned bike out.”

She shoves him affectionately and lowers herself to a crawler, the wheeled board that lets her roll on her back under the rig to look up at the engine. Squinting in the sudden dark, she raises a wrench to check the feeder hose—

“Already got it,” says a voice.

She startles, nearly bolting upright and bashing her forehead on the carburetor. Overhead, Grease chuckles. “Nice surprise, eh?”

“Thanks for the warning, you schlanger!” she yells, then says, “Hey, Max.”

He hums in greeting and her skin prickles. Lying on her back, all she sees of him are his forearms, raised to the engine above her. She should kick back out from under the rig, no use in their both being down here—

“I, ah. Hm. Have a question.”

“Oh?”

Wrench in hand, he gestures to a silver-slick tangle of tubes, one of Grease’s efficiency mods. “It’s rattling, but I don’t know why—”

“Did you check the—”

Heads side-by-side, legs poking out from opposite sides of the rig, they tinker together in the close dark. And when, reaching up, his hand brushes hers, she shudders with the potentiality of it. A spark, that’s the clichéd truth of it; and the sense that inevitably, in this dry wasteland, the spark must catch flame. She no longer thinks there is nothing to burn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Folks who know anything about engines will have smirked their way through that final scene. My experience with cars is limited to changing the oil, so… some imagination was involved here. (Feeder hose? Don’t ask.)The best writing is two-fifths bullcrap, right? Riiight?
> 
> Anyway, that’s it for Part 1. The first romantic subplot and the first external conflict have reached a point of resolution. But we stand poised for more. Think of this as the moment in the desert, Furiosa and her warriors resting in the blue-dark night, preparing to set off for the Green Place across the desert plain. We breathe, now, but there are battles ahead.
> 
> I won’t be posting next week (though I will be writing like mad): this was the last chapter I wrote before I started posting this fic. I want to get my legs under me, do some editing, write enough chapters in advance to take me through finals. _(and work on my crack-y pirate AU idea haha sorry not sorry)_ Have a lovely Thanksgiving. See you December 1st.


	13. into the breach

That evening at dinner she sits beside him. Just for the reassurance of his closeness, she tells herself, and because the Pups sometimes flock him and they’re kind of cute. He quirks his mouth in a half-smile when she sets her bowl beside his, and Capable gives them a considering look.

“So we’re going all to play cards with Toast after dinner,” Cheedo says. “Why don’t you come along?” 

“Unless you two would rather be alone,” Capable says archly, and Furiosa scowls at her, the red-headed troublemaker.

“How is Toast?” Furiosa says.

“Oh, she’ll be just fine,” Capable says. But Furiosa, watching Cheedo, sees worry flash across the girl’s face. 

Toast was asleep when Furiosa visited that afternoon, her pixieish face oddly sweet in unconsciousness, sleep smoothing her features of their usual manic energy. Furiosa sat beside the cot, watching the steady rise and fall of the bandaged ribcage until Part shooed her away. Now, as the five of them walk together to the Sickery in the evening cool, Furiosa feels herself relaxing, unspooling a little in the company of the girls and Max with his battered deck of cards. She is no longer alone in her worry. 

The ground-level Sickery still is cramped and poorly-lit, and Furiosa wonders for the umpteenth time why they don’t move the injured to some other room, someplace with skylights and running water. Someplace like the Vault, if Cheedo could stand it. But the long room erupts into sound and Furiosa’s thoughts are interrupted. The wounded Furies and sick Wretched are cheering and whooping, grinning at her.

“Toasty told us you’d be coming,” Fent says with evident satisfaction. His arm is bandaged from elbow to wrist but he grins cheerily, perched on the cot by Toast’s, beaming up at Furiosa.

“I wasn’t expecting this warm welcome.”

“Their Imperator has returned victorious,” Toast says, weakly.

“As has ‘Toasty,’” Furiosa says.

Toast scowls. “I told them that if they called me that I’d _toast_ their hides, but they don’t listen.”

“‘Chieftess’ was tricky to say,” Fent says, dimpling.

Capable grins. “‘Toasty’ is snappier. I like it.”

“Oh, don’t you start,” Toast says.

Dag shuffles the deck and the wounded draw round, wan faces bright in lamplight. But even in the atmosphere of cheer Furiosa finds herself unable to sit, irked by an absence—

She finds him outside in the dark just by the door, bent with his hands on his knees, breathing heavily. He glances sidelong at her with eyes feral and wide, no sign of recognition. Slowly she leans against the wall and he twitches; for an instant she thinks he will run from her, flee her nearness, even as she forces herself to leave a breath of distance between them. But he screws his eyes shut and remains. She looks out at the velvet night, listens to him labor.

At last his breathing eases and he straightens. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me. There’s no need to explain.”

He nods. Scratches the back of his head. “Mm. Don’t want to keep you from the, ah…”

“I don’t always breathe easy in the Sickery either.” Unconsciously her hand goes to her belly. “So if you want to take a walk…?”

He nods and they set off, his strides as long as her own and only a little uneven from injury. Thank whatever powers that be: the Rider’s bullet hurt him only barely. She wonders if it was intended as a warning shot, as when Max shot Splendid—but no, no use in going down that road. She draws a long breath that sets her scar aching. The sand around her is quiet and still at night, now; the shantytown that once spread like a tumor around the towers has been packed away into the high rooms of stone that now belong to Wretched too. Looking up she sees a few warm specks of light where, behind some window, a crowd has gathered around a lamp; a precious flame, rationed and scarce. Perhaps there is music and dancing, and card games there as well. Max steps close beside her and she feels his knuckles brush against her own.

Suddenly he stops. “What’s that?”

She peers ahead.

“There, on the Road—”

She sees nothing in the gloom.

“Thought I saw moonlight off metal,” he says gruffly, and steps away.

A distant flare of light on the road. She blinks. “Did you see—”

“Blowtorch—”

An immense clanging from above: the sniper on watch beating with all their strength against the hollow pipe that serves as klaxon. She curses: they are ill-prepared for this. “Get in—get the doors—” But Furies are already in motion; perhaps the old have trained the new, perhaps Toast took care of what she ignored, what she allowed herself to forget. In any case a young woman is heaving the Monkey Shop door closed, an ex-Milking Mother is blocking the lowest windows—where did they come from, this swarm of helpers? Capable, herding Pups up the stairs. Cheedo, blockading the Sickery. Her own feet pounding on the sand, her own breath ragged in her throat.

Gunshots resound outside, whether from her sniper or from strangers she does not know. “Nonfighters to the upper levels!” she barks. “Furies to level three!”

Even if the Furies have not trained much for this in the months since the Citadel began to claw its way up out of hell, even if the Furies are unprepared, Joe was not and neither are his towers. Stone blocks slide in tracks to seal the lower openings; narrow slits on upper levels permit defense in case of siege. The Cut disappear into the warrenlike recesses of the central tower as she climbs to face their enemies.

At a guard slit Capable hands her a rifle. “Toast is down there cursing herself blue in the face for missing this.”

“What is ‘this,’ that’s what I want to know,” Furiosa says, grimly.

The sound of a revving engine echoes up from the space between the towers. In the darkness she cannot see what vehicles they are or what weapons they carry. A sudden blaze of flame: blinking, she glimpses a biker speeding by, wrapped in characteristic rags.

“Rock Riders,” she says. “With a blowtorch.”

Abruptly Max appears at her elbow. “Tera says everyone’s in.”

“I think we pissed off the new residents of Gastown,” Furiosa says. 

“What if we apologize?” Capable says. “Explain that we meant to trade not steal, and—return the lentils—”

Furiosa hands the rifle to Max. Scowls bitterly and stands to one side of the narrow slit. Cups her hands around her mouth. “State your purpose!”

A small grenade—what the Wastelanders call a birdie bomb—smashes against the outside, sending shards of stone flying.

“Purpose seems pretty clear to me,” Max says, and raises the rifle.

“Stand down,” Furiosa growls. “Capable is right. If we can repair this—”

She lifts her hands to her mouth once more. “Residents of Gastown, hear me out!”

Silence.

“I am Furiosa, of the Many—”

A rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire, and she must duck from the stone shards. “We do not mean you ill! Cease fire and speak with us!”

“Come on down and I’ll speak to you.” A single shot.

She shifts, her back pressed to the wall near the defense slit. “What—what is your complaint?”

The voice rasps, each sentence punctuated by gunfire. “First, you took our guzz but denied us mothers’ milk.” A shot. “You traitored us. You backed out on a trade.” Shot. “Second, you left the pisstrails of a dying empire in our ravine.” Shot. “Violent men, rage-blind men, bloodied and burned, crushed and coughing out their half-lives in our canyon.” Shot. “And finally, that you invaded our Gastown and took our guzz.” Gunfire strafes the side of the Citadel. 

Something in the dry voice, the baroque list of grievances, brings back an uncertain memory. In asking her question—“what is your complaint?”—she had expected a pithy, profane shout, not the poetic list broken by single shots of gunfire. And the low, rough voice. Where has she heard it—what man—

Oh. Not a man.

Thoughts churn in her mind like the sputtering start of an engine in cold weather, the gnashing of the gears hindered by coagulated oil. That voice, so familiar—

“Ada,” she yells. “Ada, is that you?”

Gunfire explodes just outside. Then the sound of motors revving, a low shout—“Riders move out!” The noise shifts, then diminishes in the distance. She lets herself slide down the wall to the floor.

“What was that?” Capable breathes. “Why did they leave so sudden? Who is Ada?”

“She traitored me,” Furiosa says, “long before I ever traitored her.” 

The scar prickles on her belly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'M back! Hurrah!
> 
> I've written a bit further in this fic, and our favorite scarred lovebirds have gotten to know each other a bit better, and there's a ratings change coming up. (WOO!) I went ahead and upped the rating now, but don't get too excited--we've got a few more chapters of runaround, tension, etc. If you have any questions about what "explicit" will mean in the context of this work, feel free to ask. In the meantime, buckle your seat belt.


	14. a sinking star

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I edited/updated Ch 13 to be an actual chapter rather than a stub of an apology, so if you got a subscription email for this chapter make sure you read Ch 13 first, especially the author note regarding the ratings change (such excitement)! As always, thank you for your support and comments. You are wonderful.

Furies shout to each other and Cut retreat to the upper levels in the aftermath of the attack. Furiosa crouches, frozen beneath the window.

“What do you mean?” Capable asks. “What do you mean, Ada traitored you first?”

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. The room seems to clench around her, darkness coming on in waves, sounds distorted. She presses her hand against the stone floor and fights the nausea. Grits her teeth and fights with every fragment of strength she has.

“Fury?” 

She flinches at Capable’s voice.

“Back, girl. Let her sit.” Max, gruff as ever.

In a moment she opens her eyes. Capable’s teary face looms in front of her, the girl’s red hair a frizzy halo of flyaways. “Fury?”

“I’m fine, Capable.”

“Clearly you’re not.”

She smiles. “No.” Struggles to her feet.

Sniffling, Capable steps to her, wraps her in a cautious hug. She stiffens and Capable breaks away. “Sorry.”

She strides past, silent Max at her heels.

The Council chamber echoes with the hubbub of shared anxiety. Max grows tense but follows her into the crowded little room, and she is grateful to have him standing behind her, like the mopey hound dog Val used to keep that followed Val like a dour second shadow. The memory makes her smile, lends some straightness to her spine. She sits and the chatter goes quiet.

Sand, the ex-breeder who supervised the integration of the Wretched, frowns. “Where’s Toast? And why”—gesturing at Tarn—“do we need a cook at a council of war?”

“Because if this means siege—”

“—who were they, why would they attack us—”

“—raid and counter-raid, it’s the way of the Wasteland—”

“—I never raided anyone, why should I be responsible—”

She wants to scream and overturn the table, or else crawl beneath it to hide. She feels herself sagging—she is collapsing in on herself again—

A guttural shout from Max. He flushes when the room turns to him in surprise. “Um. Listen to Fury.”

“Thank you, Max,” she says. “Let’s get one thing straight: no one was hurt. Thanks to the Furies’ quick thinking.”

“Thanks to Toasty’s training,” Fent says, mournful.

“I’m almost certain that was retaliation for the Gastown—event.” She flexes the steel fingers. “My guess is the blowtorch was meant to light the old Wretched settlement, but”—murmuring—“everyone was moved inside last week. Overall we are lucky.”

“Lucky? Then why—”

She holds up a hand. “No action we took in Gastown was unreasonable at the time. I doubt she—ah, they—will listen to reason now. Note how they ran like startled dogs. Rock Riders don’t travel in large enough numbers to siege us.”

“But maybe large enough to keep us off the road. Enough to keep us from reaching the Bullet Farm.” Grease, his face creased into a mask of worry. 

“Toast, how many bullets—oh.” Fent, Toast’s stand-in, looks at her woefully. 

“We’re armed, Fury. But barely,” he says.

Sighing, she stands. “How do we withstand any crisis? Keep the holding pattern, and hope for a change of the sands.”

“Fury?” Capable, smiling shyly at her as she leaves the room. “Did you just say—hope?”

She does not respond.

 

In the safety of the upper chamber she collapses to the couch. Loosens the prosthesis and tries not to think. Her limbs are heavy; it is late and night chill creeps in the open window, unraveling her last thread of strength. A shape appears in the blue-black dark, wobbling in her tear-blurred vision: a familiar shape, a comforting shape. Max.

“All right?” But she can hear in his voice that he knows it’s not all right. How could it be all right, when—

Enough. She reaches for him, blindly, in the dark, and feels him flinch when her hand brushes his face. Fear courses through her nervous system like the gush of the great pumps: she asks too much, he will run. But he does not run. Instead he cradles her head in both his hands and holds her as she cries.

When the women come in later they are still curled together on the couch, Furiosa’s face pressed into the collar of his jacket, his hand on the back of her neck, thumb tracing gentle circles through her close-cropped hair. The women part around him without a murmur and disappear into their rooms. Perhaps Capable grins in victory, perhaps Cheedo gives a watery smile; Furiosa, buried in the smell of leather and warm skin, does not raise her head to see.


	15. the future unknown

She wakes on the couch, alone. Bites back the needling panic—he left, he ran, he fled—because of course Max is just in the Monkey Shop or some other place, working already, since it is late morning and the girls didn’t wake her. She buckles on the prosthesis—did she take it off last night? she doesn’t remember. Of course Max is in the Monkey Shop—but perhaps she will drop by, just to see. 

The familiar worn leather boots stick out from beneath the Green Rig and some small, shameful, desperate part of her unclenches at the sight. Of course he is here. She shouldn’t have felt so nervous.

“Lady!” Grease lingers by the entrance, wiping his grimy hands on a rag. 

“Hey, lazy. Loafing again? What do I feed you for, huh?”

“A question I ask myself every day.” He grins at her roguishly. “So, about that guzz.”

“Yeah?” 

“I did some math, and we’ve now got more’n enough to get a bike and the Rig to the Bullet Farm and back. Even counting guzz for cooking and stuff.”

“Excellent.”

“But.” He turns theatrically to the shadowy back of the Monkey Shop. “Somebody wanted to show you—oy! Torch! Where you at?”

Rustling sounds from the back of the shop. A few bashful Pups trot out, carrying a box: metal with a glass lid and a shiny flap that folds up from the top. She watches, amused, as they set it up, too shy to meet her eyes. 

“Tell ‘er, Torch,” says Grease, beaming.

The smallest Pup steps forward. “A solar cooker! You put the cooking pot in the box—and the sun gets beamed in by the reflector”—gesturing to the shiny flap—“and then the glass traps the heat!”

“Save some guzz in the kitchens if we build up a few big ones,” Grease says.

“To cook up the bugs that you gather,” Fury says, recognizing the small faces. They scuff their bare feet in the sand and smile up at her.

“Go on then,” Grease says, and the Pups retreat with a patter of small feet in the sand.

“It’s brilliant, Grease.”

“Hmm.” He chuckles. “I’d take the credit but it was those Pups who thought it up. And your boy and your girl who helped ‘em build it.”

“My—what?”

“Your girl. The redhead. And—” He grins wickedly. “Your boy. Or man, rather.”

She scowls at him. “I don’t know what Capable’s been telling you—”

“Capable? Capable hasn’t told me a thing. Why, is there something to tell?”

She swings at him and he deflects it with a raucous laugh that buoys her like it did when she was eighteen and freshly scarred and violently defensive. When he took her into the shop and put a wrench in her hand. She remembers Grease from long ago, bickering amicably as he tinkered, putting together her first rough prosthesis. 

“Now, I figure we’ll need a bit more oomph when we set off for the Bullet Farm,” Grease says with a significant look. “In light of—last night, and all.”

“Uh huh.” 

“So in addition to the solar cookers we’ll see if we can’t cook up some new defensive mods on the rig.”

“That pun was bad even by your standards, Grease.”

“Well.” He smiles, proud of himself. “It’s good to be prepared.”

With a final glance at Max’s battered boots, she turns and strides out into the burning sun.

 

“Nuh uh.” Tortoise, arms crossed across her ample chest, stands fierce in front of the passage into the storage catacombs.

“Why not?” Fent says. 

“You’re supposed to be resting up, if I recall,” Tortoise says, glaring at Fent’s bandaged forearm. “And I’m not letting our Imperator down into the dark today. What if those assholes come back and you are four miles beneath the ground, searching for spare parts?”

“Aw, c’mon,” Fent says. “You’re not going to make me sit in bed all day cuz I twisted my wrist on the Rig, are you?” He turns and looks pleadingly at Furiosa. “S’not even a real war wound. Stupid mediocre effing wrist—”

“Sitting in bed all day? What nonsense,” Furiosa says. “As I remember, you were on a strict assignment to keep Toast entertained.”

His eyes light up, then he shakes his head. “But—”

“Go on, you heard what she said,” Tortoise says. She chuckles as Fent scampers away. “You think they’ll be back, Lady? The Rock Riders?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well.” Ever-pragmatic, Tortoise shrugs. “At least we’ve got our sentry, eh? No chance they’ll sneak up on us.”

 

She spends the day drilling the Furies. Toast’s recruitment worked better than she had guessed, and the little force is perhaps fifty members strong. Twenty or so are half-lives, who make up for their physical weakness with a good understanding of how to fight and how to defend; the rest are new recruits, a range of ages and physical abilities. They listen to her closely as she shows them the sentry stations, explains the best defensive strategy. By the end of it she has almost—almost—convinced herself that they have a chance.

 

That night she eats in the Sickery. The dank room with its jagged, faintly sweating walls holds no pleasant memories for her, nor for Max, who sits close by her elbow and fidgets over his dinner. But Cheedo came to them that evening and asked if they would please, please eat with Toast, and Furiosa saw something in Cheedo’s brown eyes that kept her from asking questions. The girls are all here—Fent is practically over the moon, asking Dag about her tattoos, undeterred (perhaps further impressed) by her scowling responses—and Toast smiles and speaks softly, propped against a pile of pillows.

Then shots echo through the Citadel, and a long high shriek from outside. Instantly Max is on his feet, sprinting for the door—but he is only closing it, heaving the heavy stone block into place. She runs to the stairs, mounts to the second story.

Tortoise was wrong. They are caught by surprise.

She peers out the defensive slit. It’s the new moon and outside she sees nothing but blackness. She curses. The stars are out; in a moment her eyes will adjust—

Wavering lamplight enters the narrow room. “Cover that light, they’ll see us!”

“I figured I could struggle up the stairway, but struggling up the stairway in the dark seemed a bit much.” It’s Toast, bandaged and haggard and grinning like a thief.

“Toast—by the Allmother—”

“Oh hush,” Toast says, wheezing slightly and lowering herself kneel by Furiosa’s side. “I seem to remember you up and about long before your lungs worked again.”

“Cheedo—”

“Didn’t even notice me leaving, in the chaos,” Toast says with satisfaction, covering the lamp. “You got an extra gun?”

“But—”

“C’mon, you know nobody else in this mess can shoot worth a damn,” Toast says. As an afterthought, “Except maybe Max.”

Gunfire rattles below them and Furiosa hands her the extra rifle. “You didn’t really think I’d carry only one gun, did you?”

Together, they look out through the narrow defensive slit. She can hear the roar of vehicles, see figures running. But in the gloom she cannot know who is friend or foe. At her side Toast shoulders the rifle, sighting down the stock, then lowers it with a curse. “No way to see in this fucking gloom.” She sticks her head out, shouts, “Ahoy up there!” There is an answering shout from the third story: “Ahoy, Toasty!” Toast reaches for the lamp, lifts the cover. Warm light illuminates the room and glows out through the arrow slit.

“Are you mad?” Furiosa grabs at the lamp. 

“Get down!”

Gunfire explodes through the slit above them.

“Missed us! Better come and get us!” Toast shouts from where she lies on the floor.

“You are mad—”

“Stay back, Fury.” Toast is grinning, confident, her narrow face alight for the first time since the Rock Riders’ bullet burned its way into her side. “Just a minute more.”

Muffled voices from the ground below—“If I get just a little closer, I can chuck it—”

“They’re going to throw a birdie,” Furiosa snarls. “A little bomb flying in this window, is that what you want?”

Then there is an immense crash from outside, a shower of stone and sand and boulders plummeting past the defense slit. The avalanche continues, muffling the single yell from the sand outside. She hears whoops from the Furies on the third floor. “Got ‘em!” 

Toast grins. “You didn’t really think I’d lie in bed and miss all the action, did you?”

“What—”

“Booby traps,” Toast says. “Loads of ‘em. I sure am glad you sent Fent back to help me, Lady. He follows directions well.”

Furiosa gazes at Toast as the woman reaches for the lamp. Something in her wishes to memorize the small face bright with savage glee, to guard Toast’s lamp-lit features against Fate, against the future unknown. Against the bloodsoaked bandage wrapped tight around Toast’s narrow torso. 

Standing, she looks out the slit. She hears retreating motors, fading shouts. Throwing herself against the window she sights for the short figure on the lead bike, silhouetted against the starlit sand. She shoots, once, but the figure rides on.

“Lady.” Max skids in through the doorway. “Tera thinks we routed ‘em. Took out a vehicle with that, ah, impromptu rockslide.” He glances at Toast.

Furiosa lays an unsteady hand against the wall. “Why did they attack? We live in a fortress, for Allmother’s sake. They don’t stand a chance.”

Max shrugs. “We live in a fortress without bullets.” He meets Furiosa’s glare and she is glad for his frankness, his willingness to admit the uncertainty of the future.

It is still outside, and quiet, and so she hears the soft exhale, and turns to see Toast fall back, unconscious, into a black slick of blood.


	16. a sudden ragged outburst of joy in the dark

She can hear the chaos as she descends the uneven stone stairs. Cheedo is crying and Part is rattling about and Capable is swearing more fluently than Furiosa knew she could. “Where in the Allmother’s creation did that ungrateful schlanger-eating Rig-wrecking smig go?”

Furiosa strides through the doorway with Toast draped over her arms like a wounded maiden, and the chaos intensifies.

“Get her in the bed.” Grim Cheedo looks ready to save Toast, or kill her; Capable’s expression leans definitively toward the latter. “So help me, I’m going to—”

Pillows are plumped; water is dribbled across Toast’s lips. Furiosa paces to the door where Max stands sentry. He nods back at the bed and she turns to see Toast’s eyes blink open.

“Mother’s sake, I was only out a minute.”

“You’re not supposed to be out at all. You’re supposed to stay in bed where you belong.” Capable whirls as if to slap her; an ashen Fent gazes at Capable in awed adoration.

Toast smirks. “Look. Did I, or didn’t I, send them packing?”

“I don’t care! You are not allowed to risk your life—”

“—and what do you think we all do, what does Fury do every day, this is War—”

“Enough.” Furiosa steps forward and wraps Toast’s hand in both of her own, the metal one and the flesh one, and looks down on the small brown face now eerily pale. “Toast, I’m glad you did what you did.” Outcry. “But in future you will conduct your booby traps from bed. And you will most certainly tell me about them beforehand.”

Toast sighs. “Fine.” Despite her unnatural pallor she looks triumphant. Then her smile fades; her free hand fumbles against the bandages. She looks suddenly uncertain. Capable scowls.

Cheedo draws a ragged breath. “I want everyone out of here.”

“What—”

“We’ve had enough adventure in the Sickery for a night. Go—go fix things up, or something.”

Furiosa smiles at Cheedo’s erect posture and trembling lip. “Come on, Capable.”

Outside it is quiet: the clarity just after the storm. She notes the way Max steps out right behind her, gun raised like a guard at her left side—to protect her perceived weakness, or to grab on if, as before, he finds himself hanging from the Rig with only her prosthesis suspending him above destruction?

She pushes the thought from her head, suddenly dizzy, and fixes her eyes on Tera, lumbering toward her through the gloom.

“Tera—”

“Best head up to the Council chamber, girlie.” 

“Can it really be Ada?”

“Don’t mention that name,” Tera snarls, her wrinkled fingers forming the earth-circle sign the Vuvalini use to ward off misfortune.

“But—”

“Listen.” Tera shoves her face close to Furiosa’s. “That—woman disappeared from the Sisterhood eighteen years. I haven’t heard of her since and I haven’t wanted to. And I won’t say a thing more.” Scowling, the old woman turns and stumps toward the stairwell. “Come on up the chamber now, girlie.”

Furiosa catches the barest nod of assent from the guard at her left, and they turn as one to follow Tera.

Inside the Citadel proper she hears voices and children crying and once a snatch of song, but the stairwell is blessedly empty. Their boots ring loud on the stone and her eyes strain to glimpse the uneven steps ahead in the dim snatches of starlight from the defense slits. She pauses on the halfway landing, as she always does, to rest her still-weak lungs. Max hovers near her, brow knit with concern. “All right?”

“Yeah.” She watches as Tera smirks back at them and disappears up the stairs. “What about you? Are you all right?”

He shrugs. Don’t worry about me. As if she can help it. Inhaling, she fills her lungs until they strain like they’re splitting.

“Fury—If, ah. Um. Toast. If Toast needs blood—” His eyes meet hers, then flick away. “I would be willing.”

She tries to look at him—really look at him—but the stairway is too dim; his eyes elude hers in the dark. “Max. I wouldn’t ask you to do that.” 

He steps into the faint light of the window and for a moment his face is so expressive, so entreating, that she stumbles off the stair and kisses him abruptly. His face flinches and he shudders away. Appalled by her reaction, by the significance of his offer, she steps back. “I couldn’t ask that.”

“You could.”

“Well.” She flicks the buckle of her prosthesis. “I—thank you, Max.”  
“Fury—” He lays a hand on her shoulder and she turns back to him, to find his arms around her neck and his mouth against hers. The kiss is harsh, urgent; she presses against him, unable to think, and when he too soon breaks away his breathing is uneven. “Fury, if I—ah. If sometimes I can’t kiss you.” He smiles. “Hmm. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”

Wordless, she lays her forehead against his.

“Are you lovebirds coming up any time soon?” Tera’s voice echoes back down the stairway. They stumble apart, flushed, and perhaps it is just the tension of the day but she finds herself laughing, a sudden ragged outburst of joy in the dark.

 

Again, the Council is desperate, confused; they turn to her for answers and she finds herself calcifying into stone, unable to look into their angry and worried and fearful and belligerent faces. Unable to tell them the truth: that she does not know. But that is what she must say.

“I don’t know.”

“What?” Snarling, Sand turns to her from the other side of the Council table.

“Of course you don’t know, Fury.” Tarn, the old man who minds the kitchens. “We aren’t asking you to know.”

“Yes we are!” Sand scowls. “Tell us, Lady, what it is we are going to do now. We can’t let them—insult us like this! They come and shoot at us, and we—hold meetings? This is preposterous!”

“I’m just grateful no one died,” Furiosa says.

Capable scowls. “None from our side.”

“We have tried to talk to them,” Furiosa says. “We can unbury that vehicle, try to see what we’re up against. But for now we arm ourselves. ”

“With what, exactly? We have no bullets—”

Furiosa smiles. “I’ll have to talk to Toast.”


	17. heat rises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have returned! After much sweat the story is FINISHED, hallelujah. It ended up a different shape than I expected, but--it ENDED. You may anticipate regular updates from now til Chapter 21.
> 
> As always, thank you for your kind comments. And be warned that this chapter begins our exploration of Furiosa's backstory and therefore contains mentions of violence.

“I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”

Furiosa ignores Capable and heaves the wheelbarrow upright. Stone and rubble from the excavation cascade onto the floor. They are building traps, to Toast’s specifications. Outside, she hears shouts from the digging crew: a trench between two towers of the Citadel, to be lined with sharpened stakes and covered to make a pitfall. The latrine trench is being dug faster now as well, to provide rubble for Toast’s pet avalanches. Capable, shaking her head, stands at the window and watches.

Furiosa rolls her left shoulder and hisses at the grinding pain. “If you can get them to parley, we’ll talk about peace. For now we defend.”

Capable shakes her head. “I don’t like it.”

 

They have rigged the Lift back into existence to haul earth from the ground to the upper levels; the Pups who run in the wheels are all volunteers now, though they are the same crew who ran it long ago. Now they are bigger and stronger, and supervised with love: Tortoise calls for frequent water breaks, Dag distributes baked potatoes. Furiosa, callused hand and metal hand together gripping the handles of the wheelbarrow, reduces herself to a mechanical being, shoveling and hauling and no more. The sound of the rattling lift wheels grates at her; memories surface and stir that she would rather remain unconsidered. But when she stops for a moment and really looks, the differences are obvious: the Pups laughing and well-fed, the pitchers of water, and Tortoise, muscles rippling in her shoulders as she shovels earth from Lift to stone. For a moment Furiosa feels a different sort of pressure in her lungs, a mounting rising lightness. Joy, at this new order.

She turns to push the wheelbarrow. Trust the strain in her shoulders and back to ground her again. A whining ache rises in her left shoulder: something misaligned ever since she caught Max in that dread moment. She grits her teeth and pushes.

Returning with wheelbarrow empty, she meets Max. He has been digging with the crew outside; there is a faint sheen of sweat on his neck and a smudge of dust across his cheek.

“Fury.” He smiles and nods his head, and she smiles in return.

He reaches for the handles of the wheelbarrow and her smile morphs into a scowl. “None of that nonsense.”

“It’ll go, ah, faster, if you have one to push and one to shovel.”

“Oh.” She relinquishes the barrow. Of course that was Max’s goal: efficiency of sweat. He knows better than to coddle her. Freed from her burden, she follows behind, taking the chance to admire the three free inches of neck between hairline and collar, above the scorched scar that marks them both. Heat rises in her own neck at the thought, and a variety of images present themselves quickly: the soft divot between Max’s collarbones. Max, pressed against the wall. Max, pinned beneath her. She shakes her head. This is idiocy: sweaty, exhausted, and mysteriously aroused by a few inches of grubby neck. It wasn’t like this with Val. It wasn’t like this with anyone, before, not with the War Girl long ago nor with the skinny blackthumb before that—of course, there had never been this sort of emotional runaround—but then Max needed his space, and so did she, if they were to let this kindle between them—but is it really kindling, this strange and nameless fire, or is it only in her mind?—

They are at the Lift. She seizes the shovel. Preposterous—ridiculous—she has a war to be getting on with—

When the wheelbarrow is full she directs him to the latest avalanche site, a deserted room on the fifth level where a wide window looks out across the sand. Max heaves up the barrow and she watches as the rubble tumbles to ground. To her surprise he leaves the barrow like that, stranded on its end, handles sticking up in the air. She is blinking at it in exhaustion—unable to quite process this disruption in the natural order of things— when she finds two rough hands gently cupping her face.

“Max—”

“Just, ah. Checking.” He peers into her eyes, lays a finger on her pulse point. “You look flushed. Shouldn’t. Mm. Push yourself so hard.”

Irritated, she covers his hand with hers. “And what about you, digging, when a few weeks ago you couldn’t stand—”

“Hm.” He smiles roguishly, then moves in slow—looking into her eyes, telegraphing his intent—to place his lips against hers. Her eyelids flutter shut and she finds her hand tangled in his hair. A slow kiss, as though they have all the time in the world, as though they are not laying traps in a strange one-sided war. His hands are at her waist, one thumb tracing a sliver of bare skin beneath her shirt. A slow kiss—she is distracted by the motion of his lips against hers, the dusty-musky smell of him—slow, she has to be slow—can’t scare him away—but her body gets the better of her and she can’t help but deepen the kiss, can’t help but slip her tongue along his lower lip, test it gently with her teeth. Can’t help but gasp and press herself against him when he responds in kind.

If Tortoise finds it odd that they return somewhat later than usual with the empty barrow, she does not say so. She does not even seem to notice the red marks down the side of Furiosa’s neck, though Furiosa—running a finger across them regretfully—knows the girls will surely notice. Max heaves a shovelful of earth into the barrow and she feels a flare in her belly. How strange, the flame that licks at her, behind her many scars.

 

She spends the evening in the Sickery, as has become her custom; with one eye on the door, in case the customary attacks continue. At her side, Max fidgets with needle and thread, mending a rent in his jacket, but she sees in the flicker of his eyes that he watches too. That afternoon the Furies stretched scrap canvas across the pitfall and covered it with sand, and Toast still grins from the memory, basking in the pleasure of a plan. But the other women seem—off, somehow. She studies them. Cheedo is nervous, diminished, as she has been for the two nights of Toast’s injury. Dag glowers; whether that bodes ill for their rations Furiosa does not know. And Capable scribbles in Miss Giddy’s blank book with uncharacteristic silence.

For the moment.

“I cannot believe,” Capable says, screwing the cap onto her pen with finality, “that you shot to kill.”

“What?”

“Toast says”—Toast, on the cot, shrugs guiltily—“that you took a shot at the retreating Rock Riders.”

“Capable—”

“They were in retreat!”

Furiosa shifts to face her red-haired assailant. “They were retreating after attacking us. They are the aggressors.”

“They are just displaced Wastelanders like the rest of us, and we don’t have any right to determine if they live or die.”

Toast breaks in. “Capable, these people attacked us—surely you can’t be suggesting that—I mean, there’s pacifism, and then there’s idiocy.”

“You were with us. You agreed. No unnecessary kills. That’s how we are different from him. From them.” Capable turns to Furiosa, eyes flashing. “Unless you know something—something from the past—some justification—”

Capable; red-haired, fiery Capable; Capable the compassionate; Capable who feels for every living thing as though she herself were the one injured. Capable is demanding her story. There is no escape; though it wrenches her Furiosa must speak. Her metal fingers pluck at the sewing project on her lap and she wonders if she can truly do this. If telling the events would be a resurrection that she cannot bear. Capable leans closer, all the anger gone from her face in her eagerness, and Furiosa sighs, and begins.

“Let me tell you about Ada.” At the foot of the cot, Max looks up at her and rests his hand for a moment on her boot. “Ada—I was nineteen. I was nineteen and riding on the back of my mother’s bike. Scouting. Ada had told me to check this canyon—something about a buried truck, to scavenge—” She stops, bewildered by the sudden tightening of her throat, intensely aware of her audience. “Well. When we rode up, there was— no truck that I could see. Just this narrow canyon. Mary said—Mary said we should turn back. She knew something—but I thought nothing of it. She was my mother. I thought she was too superstitious, too full up of the Vuvalini ‘magic.’” She lets out a shattered breath. “I got off the cycle and walked into the canyon, and behind me I heard—gunfire. I ran out, and Mary Jo Bassa was dead.” Hot tears slice down her cheeks and she raises her head, defiant. “Ada caught me as I came out of the canyon. Grabbed my arm and yelled, ‘What happened?’ As though she hadn’t just shot my mother herself. And when I turned to her she was already holding the same gun against my head.”

She presses her face into her hands. The women are so young, and already have seen so many horrors; she will spare them some of the violence of her capture. Because Furiosa was not captured without a fight. Her fingers flex at the memory and from behind the safety of the metal hand she continues, “Ada told me I should never have brought my mother into it. As if I knew—I thought we were just scouting. As if I were—responsible, for my mother’s death. I didn’t think why Ada had told only me about the false cache—I didn’t know she meant to lure me—” She lifts her face, forces herself to inhale. “Ada told me that there was no other way. She chained me to her bike and—dragged me.” Again an elision: Furiosa will not tell the women of how Ada accelerated, one hand clutched to her eye; how Ada’s blood flew back in the wind and struck Furiosa across the face; how the chain tightened around Furiosa’s wrist, and how she screamed. “We stopped far beyond the Green Place where a Rig waited—Imperator Terax, here to fetch the cargo as directed. A full-life girl; very valuable. And Ada turned back into the desert to summon the sisters and pretend to be shocked by my mother’s death and baffled by my disappearance. Perhaps she blamed my mother’s death on me. Allmother only knows how many others she sold that way before she left, and joined the Rock Riders, or whatever it was.”

The room is still save for the flicker of lamp flame against the wall. She cannot meet their eyes; she curls into herself. Toast coughs.

“Fury, I’m so sorry.” Capable reaches across the cot to stroke her head, and it is the small kindness that undoes her, sends her collapsing against Capable’s side; for a while she is insensible to the world.

When she opens her eyes the room is calm. She exhales, glad for the first time to be in a room of healing, a room where hers is not the only wound, nor the deepest. Capable, leaning against her, runs her fingers across the short hair, and says—softly, apologetically—“But I still don’t think you should shoot to kill.”

She’ll give the girl this much: Capable has a will of iron, a persistence that would make Angharad proud.

“Capable,” Cheedo says, warningly, and a fire roars up behind Capable’s eyes.

“So Ada sold her to Joe. Big deal. You know who brought us here? Who heaved my struggling body over her shoulder and plopped me in the rig? Who ignored me when I howled and fought? That was you, Fury. That was you.”

Cheedo frowns, her lower lip trembling. “Capable, you know Joe bought you—Fury didn’t have a choice—”

“I don’t mean to blame Fury. But she still picked me up. None of us are innocent. None of us deserve to die. ”

“A sweet idea, but it’s no way to survive,” Toast drawls.

“Don’t get me started on you!” Capable whirls to face Toast. “Oh look, it’s Toasty, high up in the sniper’s nest, picking who lives and who dies! Like that gun in your hand makes you some sort of god—”

“Yeah? Maybe I do decide who lives and who dies!” Toast spits. “And who do I pick to live, Capable? I pick you! You and Dag and Fury—I pick us, every time! The Citadel, the Cut! And so what if we’re all the same, all us Wastelanders? Who cares if we technically stole, and Gastown’s in the right? If they’re starting a war I’m making sure we’re the ones who survive it. That’s all I’m doing, and that’s all Fury does!”

“But don’t you see—”

Furiosa stands quietly and staggers to the door. She had meant to stay downstairs tonight, to be ready in case of attack. Oh well. In the upper room she sits in silence, empty.

Capable comes to her within the hour, her eyes red-rimmed but dry. “I’m sorry I said those things, Fury.”

She nods from the battered little sofa.

Sighing, Capable settles at Furiosa’s feet and leans back against her legs. “You know I don’t blame you for my capture. I just—I was hurting, and I lashed out. I’m sorry.”

“No,” Furiosa says, her voice low and dry. “I was complicit. You were right.”

“You got us out, and that’s what matters.”

“I’m sorry.”

Capable reaches up to rest a hand on Furiosa’s knee. “I forgive you.”

The words echo in the fierce hollows of her heart. What does Capable know of Furiosa’s guilt, that she should forgive so easily? The bargain Furiosa made, facing the Organic Mechanic in the shadowy Sickery. The years she spent in the Citadel, a lonely War Girl hauling herself up through the ranks, knowing of the Wives but shutting her mind from their suffering. The cargo she delivered though she knew it was wrong. And all because it wasn’t her—because she wasn’t in danger, because through blood sacrifice she had escaped that fate. Because she was Imperator now, and took a bitter pride in it. Through it all she had nursed resentment, of course, had a thousand times sought escape; but she had nurtured guilt as well, guilt growing like a sickly vine in her chest, a foul frail thing questing in the dark whose threadlike roots pierced her every organ. Pierced and choked and strangled.

Until Angharad found her and whispered one word in her ear. _Redemption._


	18. before, during, and after

She wakes in the small hours of the morning, curled on the couch, her stump smarting and bruised the way it always feels when she accidentally falls asleep in her prosthesis. Bewildered, she sits upright, blinking into the dark until her eyes clear and the previous night settles like a weight over her chest.

She can hear Max’s breathing and see the barest outline of his sleeping body on the cot—though he has long since healed, no one has suggested he move and so he stays there, sleeping each night by the door as if he were a stranger, an ill-welcomed guest. Sitting on the sofa she yearns to go to him, to wrap herself around him, to be comforted by the heat of his body and the sleepy motion of his fingers in her hair. Would he hold her now, knowing what she is? What she did?

She shifts, and brushes the thought away. She regrets not saving the girls sooner, that is certain. But save them she did. As for the rest of it—she is Furiosa. She does what she must do. Max knows this. Max understands her, and understands too the Wasteland law, better than Capable, better even than Toast. Furiosa does not know his past nor does she expect to. But in his eyes she has seen the bitter reflection of her own, and she knows that he has faced the same decisions, and made the choices that brought him to this moment, alive and breathing in this room. That perhaps, like her, he regrets the choosing, but never the action.

He moves in the cot and his breathing catches, the stutter of a sleeper near wakefulness; unsteady and bleary-eyed, she goes to stand beside him. A silent question. She feels his hand brush her leg and stay there, and when she slides beneath the blanket he pulls her against him, lets her press her face to his chest until the tension eases from her shoulders and the dawn light creeps in through the window.

 

She eats by Toast’s cot in the Sickery, watching as Cheedo feeds Toast potato mash from a spoon. Last night Toast fed herself. Why the change? With a curdled feeling in her stomach, Furiosa notes the pallor of Toast’s skin, the purple bruises beneath her eyes. Furiosa is at least glad to see that Toast rankles at the spoonfeeding, frowning at Cheedo and making jesting threats about setting a booby trap in the Sickery.

“No one came in the night, eh? And after all those traps were set. Irony,” Toast says, and Furiosa chuckles at the disappointment in her face.

“If preparation kept us safe out of irony, I would set a thousand traps,” Cheedo murmurs.

“I wouldn’t rely on irony,” Furiosa says. “Soon we will set off for the Bullet Farm, and I suspect the Riders will find attacking a Rig easier than attacking a Citadel.” _I will draw them away from you_ , she means but does not say.

“You’re leaving without me?” Toast pushes Cheedo’s spoon aside.

“Toast—”

“Well.” Toast looks down at the ruststained bandage over her torso and sighs. “I see.” 

Furiosa wants to seize Toast’s shoulders and shake her. _Raise your gun, girlie, the fight’s not over!_ This pallid girl on the cushions cannot be Toast, faithful lieutenant, fearsome War Girl, manic and clever and sharp; and when after the meal Toast curls into the pillow and lets her eyelids flutter shut Furiosa finds herself close to tears, and ducks out of the Sickery so that Cheedo will not see her cry.

 

Their preparations take place cautiously, Furies tiptoeing around the pitfalls, careful not to disturb the rubble at the ready in the upper levels. The remaining weapons are scraped together; the uninjured fighters are given a chance to drink up and rest their limbs from digging and hauling dirt. They will leave tomorrow at dawn.

 

Grease, a wrench in one hand and a film of dust on his face, shows her the new Rig mods. “We know they like those little throwing bombs, the birdies. So, the Pups and me, we built a Birdnet.” 

The Birdnet stretches across the top and sides of the Rig between two arcs at the front and back. It’s welded from thick metal mesh, each hole just large enough for the muzzle of a gun: a wide tunnel of wire.

“Birdies’ll bounce right off,” Grease says, grinning.

She frowns. “Looks more like a birdcage to me.”

“Oh, come on. Your fighters will have more than enough elbow room up there.”

Perhaps Toast’s injury has shaken her more than she would like, inspired this sudden cautious turn. She shifts, refuses to meet Grease’s eye.

“Look. Fury. Who has been modding Rigs for years?” Grease places a hand on her shoulder. “Who designed the polecats, eh? Who built a working flamethrower guitar?”

She hides a smile. “You, Grease.”

“Of course. This is just a grenade deflector. I know what I’m doing. So don’t worry your close-shaven skull over it.” He meets her glare with an exaggerated scowl.

“All right.”

“You’re worried.”

“We can’t outrun them in this Rig. And—I want my Furies to come home safe.”

“Hm.” He studies her. “You’re getting sentimental in your old age.”

“Hush.” She pulls herself up the back of the Rig, climbs inside the Birdnet. Runs her fingers over the wires. Testing.

 

The Riders come that night in a crackle of gunfire. An approach so well advertised that she wonders if it is more parade than attack; a warning, or a prelude to parley. 

The first bike crashes through the rotten canvas into the pitfall with the wrenching sound of ripping fabric and a single shriek from the rider. Furies yell in victory from the third level of the stone tower. Furiosa watches, unmoving, as the Riders regroup, circle back in the dark. The pitfall stretches across the main entrance to the Citadel’s central courtyard, and Furiosa sees their headlights dart and flicker just beyond. 

Then the headlights seem to steady, their beams coalescing on a single point: a figure, running out from the Citadel across the sand. Draped all in white, with a shock of red hair like a burning brand.

Furiosa’s first reaction is anger. Bright as Capable’s hair, as the dangerous red glow of heated metal, the presage of pain. Her lungs strain as she sprints down the stairs, Furies following behind her like storm clouds. When she reaches the doorway she finds herself unable to breathe. The tower is hollow, empty, airless, her lungless panic squeezing her with the crushing pressure of a desert storm.

“Stand back.” Max’s voice, low and rolling, thunderous. The Furies scuffle backwards and she meets Max’s gaze. Feels the stillness of him, in chaos. Air returns.

Furiosa nods once and turns to the door. Outside, Capable glows in the Riders’ distant lights. She stands facing the Riders across the pitfall.

Fent shifts at Furiosa’s elbow. “Are they—talking?”

“The Riders cannot be trusted. They will shoot without warning.”

“Oh,” Fent says, startled by the menace in her voice. “Should we send someone to get her?”

“No.” It would be too much risk; another figure on the sand could be seen by the Riders as a threat of attack, and Capable would be in even more danger. But she does not explain this to Fent, and in his wide eyes she sees fear, remembered rumors of an Imperator who turned traitor, who let her entire crew die around her on the sand. Ace’s voice echoes in Furiosa’s mind and she turns back to the door.

In the distance Capable’s form wavers like a candle flame, the white dress and the red hair whipping in the breeze off the desert, lit by the headlights’ unrelenting burn. Turning, Capable seems to take an eon to stride back to them, her back straight and proud. When she crosses the threshold Furiousa seizes her in an embrace half of love and half of anger. Releases her, and through strength of will prevents herself from striking the other woman.

“We parlayed,” Capable says, grinning with Toast-like delight. “We spoke. They said they blame us for leaving Joe’s army in their ravine, but they’re willing—”

“Capable,” Fent says, “what’s that on your dress?”

Capable turns, confused, and Furiosa sees it. There, tangled in the gauzy sheath Capable has not worn in half a year, on the trailing hem that drags across the ground like a train—there, a tiny shell like a bullet casing, barbed and sinister, clinging to the fabric like a burr.

“Did you find a new bullet for us, Kay?” Fent says goofily, even as Furiosa drops to her knees and tears the fragile gauze at Capable’s ankles. Standing, she sends the swath of fabric winging like a white dove far out into the night.

The explosion is a burst of orange, shockingly bright against the night sky. The burr bomb blooms into a flower of flame, unfurling with a boom that shakes Furiosa’s chest and sends Capable crumpling to the ground, her mouth open in a long soundless scream. When Furiosa picks her up she is shaking.

Later, in the Sickery, when Capable is curled against Toast’s side with Dag patting her back and Cheedo hovering and Max huddled grim and tense at her feet, Capable’s sobs ease. “I just thought—I just thought they wanted peace.”

Furiosa sighs.

“I told them we could help them if they—if they—”

“Capable,” Furiosa says, “she shot my mother. She destroyed a Green Place that was—as close to peace as I’ve ever known. Peace is not her goal.”

Capable sniffles. “Then what is?”

Silent, Furiosa eases herself down to sit on the edge of the cot. What is Ada’s motive? The way she hassles them, the way she announces her approach. Ada always leaned toward theatricality. But surely the old woman must know that it is madness to wage war from bikes on a Citadel of stone. Madness: that must be her motive. Sitting on the edge of the cot Furiosa curls her human fingers, runs her thumb across the short, blunt nails. Another motive occurs to her. She turns to Capable. “Vengeance.”

 

Standing in the dark antechamber she slowly unbuckles the prosthesis. The women still huddle in the Sickery, soothing Capable. But Furiosa has never been one for soothing generally, and certainly not now, when the image of the flower of flame still floats before her eyes.

They tried to kill Capable.

She stares, wondering, at her hand as it shakes and trembles. Furiosa, daughter of Mary Jo Bassa, former Imperator, Lady of the Citadel, has the jitters. Post-conflict quakes, the ache of the still room setting her jaw twitching. Tension writhing like a live wire through her shoulders. 

She paces. The small barbed bomb—where did the Rock Riders get technology like that? A bomb so small, if thrown, could easily bypass Grease’s Birdnet. Their run to the Bullet Farm is risky enough as it is. Perhaps they should wait—but no, with ammunition supplies so low, she must make the run as planned. But there is no use in letting her thoughts churn like this—she must rest—

She throws herself onto the sofa, watches in disgust as her leg begins to bounce up and down. Jitters. Adrenaline surging through her system like the great pumps turned on high. She’s seen many a driver rattled by the jitters before, empty eyes and quaking fingers leading inevitably to a slip of the steering wheel and a crash of fire and twisted metal. What was it Mary Jo Bassa used to say? “Keep your head before, during, and after.” Even after a battle there are plenty of ways to die.

Footsteps, and a light in the doorway. Max stands holding a lamp and she lets her eyes drift over him. He must note the sweep of her gaze because a corner of his mouth quirks up into a smile. In an instant she is wrapped around him, her hand up his shirt and her teeth against his neck. Wrapping her left arm around his neck she pulls him down to kiss him savagely. He brushes his teeth against her lip and want rises in her belly—ignition gunning—the rig of her desire accelerating with a boom of drums and a gout of flame. Her fingers graze his nipple and she feels him gasp against her mouth. Then she is pulling away—seizing a handful of shirt and dragging him with her, the pod behind her Rig, the fuel to her engine, across the antechamber into her small room with its the narrow cot of rags. 

He stalls in the doorway. “Furiosa. Our first time—” He gasps. “Can’t—not like this—”

Grinding her hand across her eyes, she presses on the brake of her want. Looks at him—really looks, seeing the fear in his face that keeps him just outside the door. How hard it is for him not to run, to remain standing there, meeting her eyes, honest and open and fragile. She senses the intensity of his desire. How great his fear must be, then, to overpower it.

“I’m sorry.”

He comes to her, buries his face in the soft place between her neck and shoulder. “It isn’t that I don’t, ah—”

“I know. It’s okay.” She pats his shoulder, tries to tame the ragged edges of her breath.

“It isn’t.” Softly, he kisses up her neck. Presses his forehead to hers and stares into her eyes. “I want—” He trembles. “Let me—” Shutting his eyes, he leans in to kiss her. She is surprised by the bruising force of the kiss, his barriers of caution tumbling in desperation, and she shudders despite herself, her hips rolling against him. She feels one hand slide down her side, the other shifting—slowly, carefully—past her belt buckle down the front seam of her trousers. She gasps. He looks at her, face inches from hers, the barest uncertainty in his eyes. “If you want—”

“Yes.” She moans at the pressure of his fingers. “Please.”

Her legs have become unsteady and so she lets him guide her to the wall, leans against it and arches into his kiss. His lips move to her jaw, then the soft divot between her collarbones, then he is kneeling before her, his fingers light on her belt buckle, looking up through lush lashes with a question in his eyes. She gasps “Yes—,”pulls at the buckle herself, desire making her clumsy. It yields to his touch and she sinks her hand into his hair, moaning at the hot slide of his tongue against her.

His hands wrap around her waist, bracing her; she props one leg against his shoulder. Max is a careful lover, attentive, as she knew he would be, his only flaw too much gentleness, a soft caution unsuited to her reckless and insensible lust. Hoarsely she cries “More—” and, shuddering, he complies. When she comes her shoulder grinds uncomfortably against the stone but she doesn’t notice, her senses engulfed by the crash of orgasm and the feel of Max’s hair in her fist.

Afterwards she sinks to the floor, breathing heavily. Her trousers are hitched awkwardly around her legs. Max looks dazed, his eyes dark, and she wonders if it is fear or desire that widens his pupils. He cannot meet her eyes. She winces as he shifts back, shaking his head, his eyes unfocused.

“Max.” She lays a hand on his boot. “Breathe through it. You’re here. Look at me.”

He blinks, shudders, nods once; opens his eyes. When she sees the glimmer of reason in them she leans in and kisses him. His swollen lips still bear the taste of her and when she breaks away he stares back desperately, a man trapped by something beyond his ken.

But he sleeps at her side that night, curled around her like one cupped hand around another, and listening to his breathing she tries to absorb the sweet poignancy of the moment, to keep herself from wishing anything in the future beyond the Rig and the raid. She cannot let herself wish for him to stay. Instead she will protect herself from any need except the one that has brought her to this point. From any need except survival.


	19. to burn, to return

She floats into contented wakefulness. Eyes closed, she reaches for him in the warm nest of blankets. Her fingers scrape stone. She jolts awake.

The warmth that had buoyed her now threatens to drown her. She thrashes out of the tangle of blankets in the confused dark of just-awake. Standing, gasping, in the center of the room, damp with sweat, she confronts what she already knows: he is gone. 

What has she done, inviting him into her bed, terrifying him beyond repair? What has she done, allowing herself to depend on him? It is enough that he flows in her veins. He cannot be her air as well.

Bending, hand clenching her side, she endures the attack. Lets it grip her, without him to comfort and soothe. Draws breath after grating breath. She endures, and gradually the tension eases. When she staggers into the common room to greet Capable her voice is hoarse and ragged. “Ready the crew. We ride today.”

 

Alone in the cockpit of the Rig she jams the bone-handled knife into its slot in the gear shift and flicks through the start code. She can hear the Furies shouting and laughing from above but there is no one in the Rig beside her. The way it always has been. The way it ought to be.

“Fury.” Grease, outside the door. “That little bomb on Capable’s hem. The—burr bomb.” He pauses, shifts. “The Birdnet won’t stop that kind of tech. Our Furies would be open targets. In this little Rig, with no guns—they won’t stand a chance.”

Furiosa smiles, more grimace than grin, every tooth exposed: the grille of a war machine. “We ride today.”

Ace would have shrugged and said “Ok, boss,” and let the Rig run on. Grease scowls and slams one stained hand against the door. “Don’t be stupid.”

She starts the engine. 

He wrenches the door open. “You’re going to put your crew in danger on the open road, with no ammunition. Don’t do this.”

She looks ahead, unmoving. He does not understand. He does not understand her need to fight and to flee, to bring this battle to the only arena she has ever excelled in. To fight Ada on the open road, and perhaps to forget Max there as well.

“Your man is in the Monkey Shop fixing Tera’s bike.” His voice is low, conspiratorial, and when she turns to him in shock and anger—anger, that he presumes the nature of her relationship with Max; shock, that she was wrong, that Max remains—he catches the front of her shirt and pulls her close. “Don’t be stupid.”

She shoves him roughly away. Sits, silent, until at last she reaches and flicks off the ignition. Clambers past him, avoiding his eyes, and calls to the Furies. “Change of plan. We stay.”

Disappointed shouts from the fighters crouched in the Birdnet. But Capable, perched on the bike beside the Rig, smiles at her. Furiosa scowls. Of course Capable would approve—Capable the self-sacrificial, messiah of kindness, dressed in white linen, the antithesis to Furiosa’s life of grit and lead and oil.

Capable in white linen who knew a life of unimaginable cruelty, and who last night was nearly immolated in an orb of fire. 

For a moment she considers stepping close, laying her forehead against the girl’s in the greeting she has not used since Ada’s reappearance. But she turns away, to dismiss the Furies and park the Rig.

 

By midmorning she has found her way to the greenhouses. Dag’s domain. She has not stepped into the warm glass rooms for weeks; in the preparation for War she divided her time between training the Furies and tweaking the Rig. Looking around she is struck by the change: now every planter overflows with growth. Green stems bend with the weight of the harvest. The smell of wet soil is heady, intoxicating; she inhales the humid air and feels her lungs relax, released from the dry tightness of the desert. Here she stands, in the green heart at the center of the Citadel.

Dag approaches with an armful of tools and Furiosa looks at her closely. Dag’s once-pale clothes have become green-tinged from the juices of crushed stems and her long white hair is crowned with a circlet of dry woven branches. The tattoos that began as fierce marks on her knuckles have grown into wreaths of leaves and vines that wind up her bare and muscular arms. In the inkwork Furiosa recognizes Cheedo’s artistry, the handed-down knowledge of Miss Giddy. Dag has flowered.

Furiosa accepts the shovel that is pushed into her hands and begins to heave earth into a fresh planter. All around the greenhouse hums and chatters and clanks as Wastelanders harvest and pull weeds and mix manure into the planters. It is a background rumble not unlike the chatter of voices and engines in the Grease Shop: the sound of humans at work.

Dag joins her, smoothing the earth in the planter. She shows Furiosa how to set bean seeds: sink your finger in the earth up to the first knuckle, place the seed, pat soil over the top…

“Remember that time I flipped a planter?” Dag says, sardonic. “You told me that either Max would leave or everyone would forget about him.” She tucks her hair behind her ear with one tattooed finger. “You were wrong.”

Furiosa flinches.

“No shame in needing someone.” Absently, Dag runs one finger across the tattooed vine on her wrist.

Furiosa focuses her gaze on the bean seeds cupped in her palm, as if to burn them with the force of her stare.

“On the other hand,” Dag says slowly, “there’s also no shame in tipping over a planter and yelling until you feel better.”

“I almost led my crew into the desert nearly unarmed. That’s—worse than tipping a planter.”

Dag shrugs and plants seeds in silence. After a time Furiosa breathes again.

When the planter is almost finished, Dag pauses. “Why won’t this Ada person leave us alone?”

“People do strange things.” 

“Yeah, remember that time you drove five girls across the desert?” Dag says. “Just to save an ideal, or whatever.”

“Just because Splendid bullied me into it.”

“Hah. You don’t fool me. I know that’s not true.” Dag fumbles in her pocket, drops five more seeds into Furiosa’s palm. “Forget Capable. We need warriors too.”

“Mm.”

“And after the war, the warriors will come home and pull weeds until their hands bleed.”

Furiosa almost smiles, and smooths the soil with her metal fingers.

 

She works until nightfall. Shoveling soil, welding planters, patching the irrigation pipes. She works until the familiar ache in her shoulders and back drives all other thoughts from her mind: her dependence on Max, her battle with Ava. The empty bins where bullets should be stored. The Rig, parked in the shop. Capable’s pacifism. The fear in Max’s eyes, last night after he touched her. She works until her mind knows the rhythm of her breath and no more.

 

“Dag, what is this?”

The pile of dead twigs and branches rises waist-height in a side room. Dag shrugs. “Junk too dry to compost.”

Furiosa stands for a moment before turning back into the humid greenhouse. Too dry to return to the earth. But not too dry to burn.


	20. thus rises the dawn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be warned that this chapter includes discussion of surgery (eg, the Organic Mechanic). If you don't think you should read this chapter, let me know and I'll give you a safe summary.

The wheelbarrow squeals a little as she eases it down the stairs. She shifts, scraped by the tangled branches that poke her from the top of the barrow. Wisps of dried weeds work their way beneath her shirt and itch. It is evening and night has fallen; no one sees her guide the barrow down the final stair and out onto the open sand.

The wide-mouthed hollow of the Monkey Shop emerges as a cavern of deeper black just visible against the stone tower. She rolls the cart over the threshold and pulls it to her bike. Lifts the handles to empty its contents onto the spare sheet of canvas. Bundling the half-rotted canvas, she hitches it behind the bike. When she swings a leg to mount the bike, she blunders into a solid shadow.

“Ah. Missed you at dinner tonight.”

“Max—”

“Grease thought you’d be down here. Though he didn’t mention the, ah—” She hears him fumble behind the bike, his intake of breath when his fingers touch the canvas. “What—”

She waits, mute and furious.

“Fury, what is this?”

His use of the pet name angers her: the shortening and softening of her title. She is nobody’s sweetheart, nobody’s daughter. The air begins to ebb from her lungs. Reaching, she clamps her metal hand around the handlebar. She will not collapse before him. She will not admit her need. But he must hear the raggedness of her breath because his fingertips brush against her arm, just above the prosthesis.

“Max—”

He edges around the front of the bike, his fingertips never leaving her skin. Then he is beside her, his arm circling her in a cautious embrace. Wild, she clutches him.

Time passes. Her dry sobs ease.

He loosens his hold and she steps back, coughing. “I thought I had frightened you. I thought you would leave.”

A pause. She hears the unmistakable sound of his boot toe scuffing through the sand and suddenly in her mind’s eye she sees him looking at his feet, mute, the uncomfortable-Max posture she knows so well.

“I, ah, wanted. Ah. To leave. But—I didn’t.”

She imagines his helpless shrug, the way he would look up at her now from beneath his brows, if she could see him.

“Instead you’re the one out here with the, ah, bike and the—”

“Fuel.”

“Eh?”

“That’s what the garden stuff is. Fuel.”

He is silent and she can sense him working it out. The details of her plan seem childish to her now. 

“Fury?”

“Yes?”

“You were going to set a fire.”

“Yes.”

“To draw them to you—alone?”

She adjusts the prosthesis, recalling the litany of reasoning that she had recited to herself as she hauled the dry branches in the barrow, and again when she loaded her gun. “Ada’s revenge—it is intended for me alone. I do not think the rest of the Rock Riders would fight so hard, against such harsh odds, to avenge the loss of a sack of lentils.” _After all_ , she thinks, _none of them lost an eye._

“So you would, ah, light the fire. And draw her to it. And—talk?”

Her right hand moves to the small of her back, fingertips tracing ever so lightly the outline of the slender pistol beneath her shirt. “Yes—talk.”

“Where?”

“I was headed for the open road.” 

“Mm.”

“Well? Is it a stupid idea? Are you going to try to stop me, like Grease did?” Her voice is raspy and harsh.

“No—just. Hm. Might be better to lay the fire here. With the, ah, pitfalls to discourage her—army—from following.”

She shakes her head, then remembers he cannot see her in the dark. “Too difficult to organize.”

“Dag knows you took the branches.” His voice is low. “Capable is worried sick.”

She feels a warm glow in her chest, like a fire presumed dead that, when the ashes are stirred, reveals a single red coal buried in its depths. But the women’s concern cannot change her decision; if anything it makes her choice more clear. Better to draw Ada far away from the Four. Toast must heal; Dag must tend her garden. “I cannot endanger them.”

He coughs. “That’s, ah. Hm. Ridiculous.”

She knows what is unspoken: that they are already endangered, that her sacrifice would only spur the women to greater risk. But still—she cannot allow it—she cannot allow harm to come to them, more harm, after all they have endured— “Max, if you want to explain to the women that I was about to leave on essentially a death mission, and if you want to get Dag’s permission to burn the branches, and Capable’s blessing to shoot a woman on our doorstep, and the sentry’s understanding to let Ada enter, and the sniper’s agreement not to shoot, then I will set the fire here.”

A pause. She has posed him a list of impossibilities. In the dark she steps away from him and crosses her arms across her chest. Max of the bowed head and fidgeting feet, who can load a gun across one arm and speed a Rig over the desert, cannot do these things, cannot surmount the simple difficulty of communication.

“All right.” The sound of a boot toe scuffing the sand. “I’ll go—talk.”

When the sound of his footsteps fades into the night she is left a different sort of breathless. It is a feeling of too much air in her lungs; a buoyant, rising feeling.

 

The bonfire crackles to the height of a man. She stands close, warming her hands, the column of flame a beacon against the midnight chill. At Toast’s weak insistence the fire is set in the center of the group of stone towers, and the Furies have secreted themselves in the lowest level, ready with long sharpened pikes. There are a few remaining loaded guns—Max has one, and, oddly, Capable. Toast’s long pitfall trapped a Rider the previous night and will not prove a surprise, but still it serves as a barrier, blocking most of the main entrance to the Citadel from the Fury Road. The Riders will have to enter single file, on the edge, pressed against the stone tower.

Furiosa is ready.

“You’re sure she will come?” Capable stands with her back to the flame, staring into the darkness of the Fury Road.

“She is a madwoman. Would Joe have failed to return a taunt like this?”

“Joe would have come in with a dozen war machines and an army of sick slaves.”

“Well, Joe always had more style than Ada, and more success.” She manages to smile at Capable. “Go on, now.”

“All right.” Capable steps close and presses her forehead to Furiosa’s. Then she pulls back and withdraws a small tin from her pocket. “Hold still—”

Never in her life has another person done Furiosa’s war paint for her. She watches the firelight play across Capable’s face as the other woman smooths the grease over Furiosa’s forehead. “There. Do what you have to do.”

Her voice trembles. “Thank you, Capable.”

Capable disappears into the dark doorway of the Sickery. Now it is only Max who lingers at her side.

“You should go, too.”

He fidgets toward her and she wonders if he will take her hand. But he does not. Instead he scrutinizes her face and nods once, then lopes away into the dark, his sawed-off shotgun held loosely at his side.

So now it is just her, and the flame, and the Fury Road.

She sits. Her eyes follow the paths the sparks make in the darkness, and gradually her mind clears.

 

At the first sound of an engine her body tenses: not the stress-tension that has weighed on her these past days, but the readiness of a compressed spring, of a coiled snake resting on the sand, awaiting the stirrings of prey. She feels in her chest the rumbling of the Riders’ bikes, their engines flush with guzz from abandoned Gastown. Beyond the border of the Citadel headlights dart and dash, and she hears their ululating yells.

After a time the yelling stops. The bikes gather just beyond Toast’s pitfalls and the sound of voices echoes across the sand. She watches, her stillness concealing her intense alertness, as the lead bike revs with an inhuman growl and moves to skirt Toast’s pitfall. There is a booming crack. The bike stutters, slows, topples sideways into the pit.

Excellent. Furiosa scattered the wheel-popping spikes there, half an hour before.

Riders dismount and scramble to the edge of the pit. She hears voices raised in anger. No one seems willing to climb down to retrieve the wounded rider—or corpse, whichever it is. She imagines Capable’s disapproval, then sweeps the image from her mind. Replaces it, for an instant, with the memory of her mother’s body splayed on the sand.

A curdled yell goes up from the other side of the pit, and the Riders en masse rush the small path between the pit’s edge and the rearing wall of the Citadel. They are on foot; spikes cannot disarm them. She thrusts her metal arm into the fire at her back and grasps a single burning branch, raising it above her head. Instantly there is a rumble from the sheer wall above the Riders. Furies shout, and Furiosa watches as the crushing mass of rubble falls. 

Yet as it falls a single Rider scrambles back and deliberately leaps into the pit. Death is certain for the Rider, landing on the spikes from that height. Furiosa’s serenity trembles. This is War. But for the first time, in the distant fall of rock and scream of engine’s agony, she senses the weight of what has been lost. In the single Wastelander for whom the sharp stakes were preferable to the crush of stone she sees herself, forever leaping from one pain to another, chasing death in flight.

Is this what it means to survive? An endless flight and fall? The heat of a bonfire at your back as you stand by and watch destruction?

Firelight strikes the settling dust as it billows upward like smoke from the site of the rockfall. She feels empty, desiccated, wrecked. It seems to her that a droning sound rises from the sand all around her. She stands and staggers a little. At least, now, it is done.

But as she turns a shadow catches her eye, looming through the rising dust. She blinks twice. Yes: a stooped figure, making its way across the rubble of the rockfall. A woman. Ada, as ever leading from behind, uncrushed by the fall of stone. So it was not only Furiosa who stood back and watched death. The Riders’ so-called leader stood and watched as well. Ada, murderer and slaver, climbing toward her now across the rubble.

Her hand goes to the pistol tucked against the small of her back. So much for secrecy. She slips it from its holster and lets the weight of the gun in her palm draw her forward across the sand, inexorable and unsteady, ruinous as a rockslide. She raises the pistol just as Ada clears the rubble.

“Well, well.” Ada coughs. The light of the bonfire, now far behind Furiosa, glints off Ada’s eye, deep-set within the scarred ruin of her face. A wrinkled hand rises to fidget briefly with the patch. “Tuck away that lovely gun, girlie. Or haven’t you heard? An arm for an eye makes cripples of us all.” She laughs, dry and barking.

Furiosa shifts, and for the first time feels Max’s steadiness in the set of her own limbs, in her own cool-headed defiance. Automatically she notes Ada’s weaknesses: a limp on one side; a telltale judder in the woman’s hands; and of course the patch, its leather incised with the shape of a crude and staring eye.

“Or do you still remember what they taught you, ever so long ago?” Ada laughs again. “Mary Jo Bassa’s little commandments. ‘Hit strong by reflex, but only in defense.’ All those little nonsense rhymes.” Her mouth stretches into a leer and Furiosa realizes that the woman is taunting her, provoking her; that she, Furiosa, is standing here unmoving, looking into the face of the woman who killed her mother. Who chained her by one arm to the tailpipe and made her scuttle behind while the motorbike accelerated, until her forearm was so lacerated that the gangrene set in and the Organic Mechanic had to amputate.

She is proud of herself, and of Mary Jo Bassa’s teachings, for the steadiness of her arm. The small, devilish little gun does not tremble; her finger on the trigger is still. 

“Go on then.” Ada’s leer stretches wider. “Kill me, little girl. Take your redemption. Will you hesitate now after so long? Or should I take off the patch and let you see your handiwork?” Her hand flits to the eye patch again and this time she pulls the leather cup away, and Furiosa sees the pocket where her own adolescent fingers once sunk and tore away sight.

Furiosa fought Ada fiercely, when she came out from the canyon and saw her mother dead on the sand. Furiosa fought, but Ada prevailed, and so Furiosa was chained behind the bike while Ada dragged her to the waiting Imperator. Looking at Ada now, the gaping socket is deeper and more cruelly lacerated than Furiosa remembers, and she notes with a sort of dim admiration how much strength it must have taken Ada to fulfill the delivery, to take Furiosa to Terax as agreed. What did Ada get out of the bargain, that even bleeding and half-blind she would drive across the desert to uphold it? Or rather, what threat made Ada so afraid that she could not stop to staunch her own wounds but instead rushed to meet the Imperator? How had Joe extorted her?

Furiosa knows of strength in the face of pain. She thinks of the Organic Mechanic’s cave with its sweating walls, and the deal that, sick and weak, she made there. The final tragedy of her arrival in the Citadel. In the Vault Joe had surveyed her arm and sent her to the Sickery, where Furiosa clung desperately to her consciousness through the amputation. Afterward, dizzy and afraid and bandaged tight, standing up only through the force of her will, she had seized the bone saw still wet with her blood. Held it to the old Organic Mechanic’s throat and made a bargain: Take from me my womb and I will give you what you want, and your life besides. This is the fact deep inside of her that the women do not understand, nor Ada. The two parallel ridges of tissue on her belly: she chose them. She threatened and wheedled and made her bargain, and returned triumphant to the Vault. Joe raged at her, and killed the old Organic Mechanic outright, but it did not matter because Furiosa had created a new world where she held no womb and would be no wife. She grinned the day Joe threw her from the Vault, grinned with blood on her teeth as she argued and battled and clawed her way up through the War Boys’ ranks, and grinned twenty years later as she sent the War Rig careening down the Fury Road, free from the Citadel at last. Furiosa could bare her teeth at Ada now and snarl that life gives us each our scars. But the scars on Furiosa’s belly are chosen scars. They were not given by life; they were seized by Furiosa herself.

It is not the missing hand that aches at her. It is certainly not the loss of the womb. Standing on the sand, clenching the gun until her fingers throb, Furiosa thinks of what Ada took from her long ago, what Furiosa has been grasping after ever since. “You told me there was no other way.”

“And there was not, my dear Wasteland idealist. But shouldn’t you be thanking me? Standing there in your Imperator paint? You would have been no queen had I not torn you from the Green Place—”

The two words break her from her reverie. Furiosa steps forward and rests the tip of the pistol, untrembling, between Ada’s eyebrows. “Listen.”

Ada licks her lips, and stays silent.

“You told me there was no other way, Ada, when you pulled me from my mother’s body. You told me there was no other way when you sold me.” Who is this speaking through her? As though the Splendid Angharad lived on within her, breathing air through her burning lungs. As though Capable’s cadences echo in her mind. “Yet even in this Wasteland there is another way. Where no one starves and no one is sold. It is my redemption.” She pauses, heavy with the weight of what she must do. The old woman, vicious and deadly and cruel—the rising drone of the Wasteland—the red of her mother’s blood sinking into the sand—she shakes her head and dismisses them all. She must prove to herself that she can do this. That she herself can belong in the world she is creating. That she can raise a burning brand against the dark. 

“Ada. You are welcome—to join us.”

Ada’s face slackens, her eye empty, a chassis with the engine gone, and Furiosa is proud of herself, and of Splendid’s teachings, for the steadiness of her voice. She lowers the pistol.

There is a blur of motion. She sees Ada’s teeth bared in a snarl, and stumbles backwards, raises the pistol. A gunshot. Ada falls to the sand. Furiosa registers a scuffle of voices from the lowest level of the Citadel and sees Capable running toward her, the firelight bright on her hair. And motion, at the sniper’s slit; a face, drawn back just as she turns.

Dazed, she looks down at the pistol in her hand. Did she truly fire it? She cannot remember. But Capable is wrapped around her now, tear-damp face pressed against hers—“it’s all over, you must come inside”—is that the pale flinch of sunrise at the horizon?—she is being led in.

It is over. The dark of night has passed. Thus rises the dawn.


	21. lovely day

In the bright light of noon she goes to the body. The Furies have moved it into the scant noontide shade cast by the tallest tower; that night, they will dig a mass grave beside the Fury Road. Now, standing with the sun on her neck, Furiosa looks down at the carcass of the old woman. The empty eye socket that had seemed shadowed and sinister in the bonfire’s unsteady light looks harmless now, and Furiosa accepts the reality that has been sinking into her bones since dawn: this is what Ada wanted all along. To be killed by Furiosa. For this goal Ada led the Riders across the desert again and again. Taunting, madness, the sacrifice of others: all to bring an end to Ada’s life of betrayal, an action Ada could not take herself. Furiosa cannot know whether Ada came to her as some strange atonement, a sort of apology; or as a final revenge, a desire to taint with blood the hand of another. But in death Ada’s slack face has the serenity it did not possess in life.

Something catches her eye at Ada’s belt. She kneels and reaches to brush her powder-burned fingers across the canvas pouch resting just above Ada’s hip. The stained and faded embroidery still holds the faintest tint of green.

Ada returned to be killed by Furiosa, and to bring to Furiosa the pouch once carried by her mother.

Furiosa undoes the buckle, lifts Mary Jo Bassa’s medicine bag from Ada’s body. Strokes her mother’s careful stitchwork and eases the bag open. Inside, the familiar needle is pinned through a spare fold of fabric; Mary Jo Bassa’s lucky bullet casing gleams at the bottom. Mary Jo Bassa’s precious herbs have been crushed by the years but when Furiosa lifts the fabric to her nose she catches the faintest scent of her mother, captured in the sage dust Mary once daubed on her temples against headaches.

Furiosa cries.

When she stands, the pouch newly belted at her side, she looks down at Ada one more time. Then, caught by a whim she cannot explain, she bends and with one fingertip closes the single eye.

 

In the days after the attack and subsequent dawn, the life of the Citadel seems to pass around Furiosa at an accelerated pace. She stands still for once and watches. Capable holds a proper funeral for the dead Riders. Tortoise oversees the destruction of the pitfalls, and Dag declares new hope: at the bottom of the deepest pitfall is found soil, true soil, perhaps untainted and fresh. 

And Furiosa stands still.

In the greenhouse she settles seeds into the earth. Toast, petulant but upright in Max’s old wheelchair, shares her planting bench, and they work together quietly while Dag’s voice—cajoling, scolding, encouraging Pups and workers—echoes beneath the glass panes far above. Sometimes Furiosa pauses and gazes down through the frosted glass at the blurred figures moving across the sand. In the evenings she watches as Cheedo tends to Toast. Toast is healing; Furiosa, still and silent, for the first time feels her own wounds.

She likes to walk with Capable when the sun is setting. Together they circle the Citadel, and she listens to Capable’s bright chatter, and watches purple paint the sand.

Max stands away during this time. Dimly she knows that he is giving her the space to breathe on her own, and, thankful, she does not approach him. Instead she lets her mouth curve into a smile whenever she catches sight of him bending over an engine in the Monkey Shop or carrying a Pup on his shoulders through the Mess. 

One morning he comes to her and presses his forehead briefly to hers. “Um. The Council wants to, ah, check Gastown. Offer help to any survivors.”

She nods.

“They, ah, asked Capable and me to lead the party.” He ducks his chin and looks up at her. “Will you come?”

She says “no,” and smiles, and kisses him full on the mouth.

 

When he returns with a full Rig of guzz and the last few Rock Riders she greets them in the Monkey Shop. Extends her human hand to each of the timid new Citadel citizens, and smiles, and does her best to welcome them: a few children, and a few wounded, who were left behind in the city of slow-bobbing pump jacks when Ada pushed her crew of fighters before her across the sand to die.

That night she hears footsteps outside her chamber door. Soft steps, hesitant: unmistakably Max. She goes to him and leads him to her bed, and laughs for the first time in ages. And afterwards when they lie sweating, tangled around one another, he traces his thumb over her scars and she breathes in the clean sweat smell of his hair, and feels the daylight growing stronger in the new dawn of her heart. The sun is just cresting over the rim of the earth; and though still the night still is dark, soon the sky will be blue. Wrapped around him, glowing, she finds herself again able to speak.

“Max.”

He shifts. “Mm.”

An old question bubbles up and in her newfound calm she lets herself ask it. “When Cheedo first patched you up long ago, she said you had—tooth marks. Human tooth marks on your leg.” She rests her fingertip against the corner of his mouth, waiting to feel his face tighten into a frown, for him to turn away. Instead he nods.

“Were those from the Bullet Farm?”

“Huh?”

“When I was Imperator they said things about the People Eater. Rumors.”

“Oh.” He shrugs. “No, it was, ah, group of wild ones. Far to the south.” She feels his sigh as a puff of warm air against her breast. “I—I ran a long ways. Um. And came a long ways to get back here.”

She shifts in the narrow bed. “I used to wake up in the morning and think you had left.”

“Mm.” He stares up at the ceiling, idly stroking her shoulder, and she knows that he has considered leaving, perhaps many times in the past months. But the question remains unspoken—the question she wants answered, before she can give herself entirely to this, before she can trust with her love the man she already trusts with her life. He thought of leaving. Now what does he think?

His fingers draw slow circles across her skin. “I, ah, hm. I can stay. Now.”

She smiles wide as the rising sun.

“But—” He huffs and his leg begins to fidget. “Fury—”

They lie in silence for a while. She runs her fingertips across the soft skin just beneath his collarbone, over and over, soothing, knowing he will find the words.

“What—makes you scared?”

It isn’t a question she expected, nor one she has considered. In this moment, in this mood, she wants to say nothing: nothing can darken the golden sunfire in her heart. But that can’t be the case. She thinks of the many Citadel tensions—the smothering noon heat, the way a child’s belly swells when it is hungry. Those things frustrate her, stress her, test her; they do not make her afraid.

She says, “The thought of someone hurting the Four.” _Or you._

“You fear you won’t be able to protect them.”

“No, that isn’t it. I would kill for them, I would—” She remembers the dark of the Monkey Shop, her sure hands hitching the branches to the bike. There are some instincts that rise above survival. “If I fail to protect them it is only because I have died trying.” She pauses, and her hand goes to the little embroidered pouch by her pillow. “Maybe it’s selfish of me. But what I fear is living without them.”

“Oh.” He reaches to run a gentle thumb over her eyebrow.

“What is it you fear, Max?”

“Failing to protect. Failing them.” He gazes steadily at her and in his eyes she sees the madness, the dark grasping void. Fear and loss and grief so consuming that he still carries them within him, however many years later. No wonder he ran; no wonder she used to wake each morning alone in the bed. She brushes a toe against his leg and remembers what Val once told her, that we fear most deeply that which has already befallen us. And yet he has stood beside her these months, steady and solid, dependable Max. Waiting for her.

Abruptly Max shuts his eyes. “I don’t—want—to fail you, Fury—”

“Max, I love you.” She presses her forehead to his. “But I shoot for myself.” 

“Well. Guess I’d better—remember that. Since it’s, ah. Too late for running.”

They kiss, in a gentle frenzy of stroking hands and gasping breaths and rolling hips. And she finds, at the end of it, that she believes him. 

 

When she wakes the dawn light fills the small stone room with tender pink. Max sleeps against her and she lets her eyes drift over the naked length of him, his scarred body bared to her unselfconsciously. She will forever be amazed that her savage ride down the Fury Road could have led her to this, to the warmth of a bedfellow, a gentle soft-spoken companion. But no, the Fury Road didn’t lead her. She has not been led anywhere; all her life she has driven her own road. And yet somehow the fool still found her, and followed her, and stayed.

FIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with this story so long. It has been rattling around my skull since July, and to know it to be complete—seven months later!—is an awesome feeling. Thanks for the lovely comments, and thank you to Jammy Toast for sitting with me in the battered station wagon outside the movie theater seven months ago and freaking out over HOW GOOD this movie is.
> 
> When I wrote the last three scenes of this fic, and again when I edited them, I listened to alt-J’s song “Lovely Day” on repeat. “When the day that lies ahead of me/ Seems impossible to face/ When someone else instead of me/ Always seems to know the way/ Then I look at you/ And the world's all right with me…” To me that is Furiosa waking on this final morning with Max beside her. “Lovely Day,” like any Rockafury love song, is in a minor key; so, it seems, is this fic. Thank you for staying on the road despite the sand and oil. We made it through to the sunrise at last.


End file.
